Vercel is 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 10 years old, according to the State of Delaware, the first US 🇺🇸 state 🫡 Some reflections from the journey:
1️⃣ You can just incorporate things
"In America, they let you start companies easily". It's magical how fast you can get your ', 𝙸𝚗𝚌', your bank account, your LOIs, your payroll set up…
Docusigns fly, investors are eager to take risk, there's an overwhelming sense of optimism around technology. Business owners are the heroes of this society. We must preserve this company-building culture at all costs. Thankful to San Francisco for being the epitome of it.
2️⃣ 10 years is the baseline
It's wild to me that it feels like Vercel is just getting started. I remember prior to starting the company looking at the statistics on the median time from inception to IPO for tech companies. It was 8-10 years then and now looking like 10-14.
There are many tough moments while building a company. But what's a bad day or quarter going to do if you know this is a 15 year journey?
3️⃣ It's always day zero
When I registered the domain name and shipped the first company landing page, there was no Next.js. No Git integration. No CDN. No Turborepo. No AI SDK. No v0. At one point, Jamstack and static sites were all the rage. Now, agents and AI.
The only way to survive in this game is to have tremendous adaptability and appetite for shipping. Our first name was "Zeit", because the only way to win is to capture the Zeitgeist. As
@cramforce likes to say, iteration velocity and shipping is the solution to all known s̶o̶f̶t̶w̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ problems in the world.