Latest / DEEP INSIGHT / Vercel CEO Addresses Netanyahu Post Controversy
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Yeah, let's just start with the post on x and
- 0:03Speaker 1: the meeting Sunday. In the comments, there appear to be
- 0:07Speaker 1: employees of Verseell and customers who are reacting. Are you
- 0:12Speaker 1: able to quantify for us, you know, what that reaction
- 0:15Speaker 1: has been and sort of what your response is to it.
- 0:19Speaker 2: So thanks for having me, of course, and maybe just
- 0:22Speaker 2: to get you know, all of the noise out of
- 0:24Speaker 2: the way. And I want to clearly acknowledge that the
- 0:28Speaker 2: post did cause quite a bit of pain. I want
- 0:32Speaker 2: to obviously say sorry to the well meaning people, you know,
- 0:36Speaker 2: people that really care about this topic, people that are
- 0:39Speaker 2: hurt by the tension that exists in the world today,
- 0:42Speaker 2: but obviously not sorry to the people that are just
- 0:44Speaker 2: spewing hate and anti semitism and the people that have
- 0:48Speaker 2: come after our team. So to your point, this has
- 0:50Speaker 2: been a special time for our team and obviously our customers.
- 0:55Speaker 2: It's a very special time for the world. And maybe
- 0:57Speaker 2: I'll give you a little bit of context for the
- 0:59Speaker 2: meeting itself. Right as Versaill a leader in developer AI,
- 1:03Speaker 2: of course, we you know, get invited to speak with
- 1:06Speaker 2: world leaders about topics relevant to education, cybersecurity, AI. AI
- 1:14Speaker 2: would play a huge huge part of the of the
- 1:17Speaker 2: of the future, right, and so I always welcome the
- 1:20Speaker 2: opportunity to speak with world leaders. Obviously, you know, the
- 1:24Speaker 2: reaction to it and the optics matter a lot to us,
- 1:26Speaker 2: and we're here for our team, We're here for our customers.
- 1:29Speaker 2: There hasn't been material changes to the business. A lot
- 1:33Speaker 2: of it is noise. You know. There was there was
- 1:35Speaker 2: an ex post with five million views from someone that
- 1:38Speaker 2: allegedly quit the company. But guess what, we looked upside
- 1:42Speaker 2: down and that person didn't work for Versaill. So it
- 1:45Speaker 2: kind of also highlights a little bit of the challenges
- 1:47Speaker 2: that we see with social media today.
- 1:49Speaker 1: Jam I'm grateful that you would come on the show.
- 1:51Speaker 1: I think it's important to be honest with the audience.
- 1:53Speaker 1: You were going to come on the show earlier in
- 1:55Speaker 1: the week. Anyway, there was a lot of breaking news
- 1:57Speaker 1: and we moved things around. But just to be definitive,
- 2:01Speaker 1: you haven't had any employee resignations and you've not lost
- 2:04Speaker 1: any business at all as a result. It has a posts.
- 2:07Speaker 2: Yeah, there hasn't been any material to change to the business.
- 2:10Speaker 2: There has been impact to our community, by the way,
- 2:12Speaker 2: and I you know, I feel bad about that and
- 2:16Speaker 2: our ethos of our sell and you know, maybe to
- 2:19Speaker 2: tell you a bit of more contents about our company.
- 2:21Speaker 2: We're all about open source. The reason that I'm here
- 2:24Speaker 2: today is because I built a gigantig open source project.
- 2:28Speaker 2: We work in public, we engage with the community. We're
- 2:30Speaker 2: always listening to feedback. We use that feedback to grow,
- 2:33Speaker 2: We use that feedback to contribute directly to source code
- 2:36Speaker 2: and make our products better. And this is the kind
- 2:38Speaker 2: of things that you know, world leaders are interested in,
- 2:40Speaker 2: and this is why they reach out to us. And
- 2:42Speaker 2: I welcome that. I don't endorse politicians. I do engage
- 2:46Speaker 2: with world leaders and excited to continue our work and
- 2:50Speaker 2: continue to support our community, our customers, and most importantly
- 2:53Speaker 2: our team.
- 2:54Speaker 3: We appreciate how open you've been about all of that
- 2:57Speaker 3: what must have been an anxious time. And I'm interested
- 3:00Speaker 3: therefore about the story of Versell more broadly, because you
- 3:03Speaker 3: come on the show around the context that you have
- 3:05Speaker 3: raised money, you are building this business, and I'm interested
- 3:08Speaker 3: in particular of how many people wanted to be putting
- 3:11Speaker 3: extra money to work in your business and what growth
- 3:14Speaker 3: story you're telling them.
- 3:16Speaker 2: Yeah, we've been around for a while building what we
- 3:19Speaker 2: call the front end cloud. It's the best way to
- 3:22Speaker 2: deploy websites and applications, and it's in the world of
- 3:26Speaker 2: what I call pixels. You know, most applications had some
- 3:28Speaker 2: kind of human centric user interface, but ever since I
- 3:32Speaker 2: will call it like CHATBT. The dominant type of application
- 3:36Speaker 2: that enterprises and individuals want to create is what we
- 3:39Speaker 2: call the AI agent, which is kind of like a
- 3:41Speaker 2: digital coworker. So we announced that we're building the AI
- 3:45Speaker 2: cloud for people listening. This is sort of like the
- 3:48Speaker 2: aws of AI. And one of the goals of this
- 3:51Speaker 2: cloud is that when when you're a developer or a
- 3:54Speaker 2: company of any size, you can deploy this agents make
- 3:57Speaker 2: your business more efficient. It obviously caught the interests of investors.
- 4:01Speaker 2: We weren't planning to raise additional funds we had just raised.
- 4:04Speaker 2: The business is doing incredibly. We just passed two hundred
- 4:08Speaker 2: and fifty million dollars in revenue, growing at north of
- 4:10Speaker 2: eighty percent year over a year, supporting customers like under Armor, Nintendo, Porsche,
- 4:16Speaker 2: and some of the hottest startups in the AI space
- 4:18Speaker 2: like Brex and Ramp and Notion in all of the
- 4:22Speaker 2: up and comers, so as you could imagine the enterprises
- 4:25Speaker 2: are thinking, well, I have all this up and commercial
- 4:28Speaker 2: these startups, of these even individual developers coming after me
- 4:30Speaker 2: with AI native solutions, what do I need to do
- 4:33Speaker 2: AI transformation myself? And that's the AI cloud and the
- 4:38Speaker 2: versail is filling a massive void in the market. Today.
- 4:41Speaker 3: We've talked about the reaction of some of those of
- 4:44Speaker 3: your employees potentially and those that actually weren't current employees,
- 4:47Speaker 3: but talk to us about how you're keeping them engaged
- 4:50Speaker 3: in building with versall. Part of this raise was indeed
- 4:52Speaker 3: a secondary tender offer. Is that about giving them a
- 4:54Speaker 3: liquidity moment? Is that about ensuring you can get the
- 4:56Speaker 3: right talent through the door? Yeah.
- 4:59Speaker 2: I think employees and community have been super engaged behind
- 5:02Speaker 2: our mission. Everyone is sort of galvanized behind the idea
- 5:05Speaker 2: of building for the web. One of our core values
- 5:07Speaker 2: at Vercell's what we call for the web, and I
- 5:10Speaker 2: think the spirit of the web and openness is sort
- 5:11Speaker 2: of the things that we want to represent, whether it's
- 5:14Speaker 2: talking to world leaders or whether it's engaging with the
- 5:16Speaker 2: products that we create and putting them in the hands
- 5:18Speaker 2: of developers to build a better future.
- 5:20Speaker 1: Agailmo very quick, thirty seconds. Can you share any arr
- 5:24Speaker 1: or other financial metrics on how it's going.
- 5:27Speaker 2: Yeah, as I mentioned, you know, we've publicized that we're
- 5:30Speaker 2: at north of two hundred and fifty million dollars in AR,
- 5:34Speaker 2: growing north of eighty percent year of ear, which is
- 5:37Speaker 2: world class metrics, possibly unsen metrics for our cloud infrastructure
- 5:41Speaker 2: business that spreads a huge array of customers from small
- 5:45Speaker 2: startups to the largest enterprises, healthcare, fintech, SaaS, marketing, you
- 5:50Speaker 2: name it. And we're continuing to build from here. We're
- 5:54Speaker 2: taking the feedback obviously, we're learning from it, we're growing,
- 5:57Speaker 2: and we're excited about what the future holds.