I had the chance to join a Pear VC event where Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and SVP Aparna Sinha shared their insights, and as someone who uses Next.js and Vercel daily, it was incredibly inspiring to hear directly from them.

I had the opportunity to ask questions to Guillermo and one thing that stood out was his intense focus on learning the stories of customers. Despite the scale of Vercel’s user base, he makes a conscious effort to talk to users every day, primarily through X, reviewing open-source community, and discussing within the team whether he' have connected enough with users that week.

During the event, someone brought up the challenge of monetizing open source while maintaining developer trust, especially as enterprise use cases increase. Guillermo shared that it’s common for users to already have highly optimized setups—sometimes more mature than your own offerings. But instead of trying to control or “own” the implementation, the mindset should be: support them wholeheartedly, no matter how they’re using it.

I found his vision for open source, his relentless drive to understand customers, his clarity in decision-making, and his collaboration with Aparna Sinha all deeply inspiring!

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