April 1, 2025

How Vercel hires

Audrey Chen

Content

In this blog

First, get good at founder modeNext, scale with recursive founder modeExtend ‘if it doesn’t exist, create it’ to talentConcrete actions to implement from Vercel’s talent playbook

Vercel's explosive growth (80% year-over-year revenue increase, surpassing $100M ARR last year) is impressive but unsurprising when you consider how they power much of your internet activity.

The world's most innovative companies run on Vercel, but you might not even realize it.

When you check a request on GitHub, browse products on Shopify, send money through Stripe, record with Loom, or order Uber Eats after a long day, you're using Vercel-powered web apps. If the cloud platform shut down tomorrow, you’d no longer be able to use ChatGPT or Perplexity. And you’d definitely notice many of your daily digital interactions become slower and clunkier.

But while there's plenty of discussion about Vercel's products — from open-source web dev framework Next.js to AI-powered website generator v0 — there's much less chatter on how they built a world-class team who’ve (literally) made it their business to deliver great web experiences.

Let's take a look at how Vercel hires and scales the talent behind their technical achievements.

First, get good at founder mode

When most people reference Paul Graham’s founder mode, they’re thinking of the do-everything mentality of early-stage startups. But Vercel's founder Guillermo Rauch has a more nuanced definition that balances hands-on involvement with efficient delegation.

In a recent Acquired episode, he shares that understanding all aspects of the business is one of his key responsibilities as CEO: “A principle that I use internally a lot is, as a CEO you have to understand. You can’t just say… ‘I have no idea how it works; talk to Johnny’. I spend time learning, and that’s how I can give high quality feedback, and that’s how I can delegate [responsibilities] with confidence.”

This isn't micromanagement — it's about ensuring alignment on goals while empowering leaders to own their KPIs and outcomes. This leadership style has led to quicker executive decision-making.

“There is just no time being wasted on briefing executives. The expectation is that you understand the customer deeply, you understand the product deeply…. We optimize our entire product and platform around product velocity.”

As a result, Vercel has built a company operates the same way their product behaves.

This approach has even caught the attention of larger companies. Execs of Vercel’s customers have reached out to Guillermo about his operational playbook: "They want us to teach them how we build. They want us to export how Vercel works. They can tell that we're moving fast. By continuing to make the company and the product a symbiote, a two-way street, I think this is how we're saying really fast and lean."

Next, scale with recursive founder mode

Staying in founder mode indefinitely creates a bottleneck, so Vercel developed what they call “recursive founder mode”.

Guillermo explains in Every’s AI & I podcast:

“I believe founder mode fundamentally doesn’t scale… if your aspirations are very large, the creative output of the company can’t just be limited to the founder, especially when you have ambitions of being a company that can nurture founders within it.”

Recursive founder mode works on two parallel tracks to scale ‘founder energy’ within an org:

(1) Attracting founder-level talent – the type of people who’d probably go on to start companies themselves.

(2) Creating an environment that nurtures talent, where ambitious builders can thrive.

Doing these things simultaneously is how you build a truly scalable business and talent org.

Guillermo believes his job as a founder is to scale other founders, embedding the instinct to move fast and push boundaries into his company’s DNA. This philosophy shows in their hiring criteria, which varies by role but often includes traits like effective cross-context communication and thriving in fast-paced, collaborative environments. They’re aiming for culture where "people can come to fulfill their dreams to reach millions of developers through open-source."

And it’s working – while widely known for Next.js, Vercel has also contributed the Svelte web framework, and expanded upon the Turborepo build system, and launched v0 as a startup-within-a-startup. They’ve also incubated a vocal community of open-source builders across multiple platforms.

Guillermo’s not just thinking about how he can create the next great development framework. He's asking, “how can I create the environment that creates [open-source library] Socket.IO, and the next Next.js, and the ecosystems around it?”

Extend ‘if it doesn’t exist, create it’ to talent

Vercel's bias towards innovation applies not only to their products, but also to how they structure roles within their organization.

Vercel was one of the first companies to hire for ‘Design Engineer’, a hybrid position at the intersection of engineering and design. As a company that builds tools for other developers, they needed specialists who could code and create scalable design systems to build products as functional as they are delightful. Rather than accepting the traditional handoff delays between design and development, they articulated a specialized role combining aesthetic sensibility with technical skill to increase the speed and quality of development. Their search for Design Engineers likely spurred an increase in this skillset as other startups adopted the term.

Guillermo explains: “Common wisdom in Silicon Valley was, you're either knee-deep in the data center room writing back-end code or you're the designer with a super polished mustache.” But this binary thinking limits talent potential, which is rather ironic in an industry that prides itself on breaking conventions.

Vercel has continued this approach with roles like 'Content Engineer' and 'Sales Engineer'. These atypically-named GTM positions emphasize the high level of technical knowledge required in any Vercel position, while reinforcing how the company operates, making it clear that only those comfortable with heavy cross-domain collaboration need apply.

Concrete actions to implement from Vercel’s talent playbook

Vercel complements their talent strategy with three practical tactics:

1. LFG first, ITG next

Vercel’s team practices iterate to greatness (ITG); this value means they prefer to launch an initial version rapidly, but will continue to iterate on it.

It’s an ideal middle ground between shipping quickly and shipping perfectly; things are rarely flawless the first time around, but you keep pushing toward excellence with each iteration.

2. Your employer brand = your law of attraction

Vercel's careers page reflects their product philosophy: clean, minimal, functional. Instead of explaining their company culture through bullet points, they demonstrate their values through the user experience. They build for simplicity; they like things to be as easy and accessible as possible; they operate lean. A candidate’s interaction with the careers section is frictionless and polished — all relevant information and the application itself appear on a single page.

This approach begs the questions:

• What does your candidate experience show (not tell) potential applicants about your company?
• Is your employer brand aligned with your product?

If rehauling your employer brand isn’t feasible at the moment, you could consider getting external talent partners to advocate for you, through platforms like Paraform. (Expert headhunters can also proactively put you in front of top candidates on your behalf.)

3. Invest in talent systems that drive volume and quality

Vercel's leadership recognizes that talent density is crucial to their mission to “enable the world to ship the best products”. COO Jeanne DeWitt emphasized: "Scaling a company is not just about operational rigor. It's about ensuring the culture, energy, and standards stay just as high as they were in the early days."

Inbound leads are great, but not enough if you want to hire in weeks rather than months. Like other high-growth companies such as Faire, Vercel invests in sourcing technology and has worked with external talent partners to maintain a high-volume, high-quality candidate funnel.

Vercel's approach to hiring generates a reinforcing feedback loop: their high-ownership team shapes (and rapidly ships) exceptional products, and those products attract exceptional people who share similar values and ways of operating. This cycle is likely exactly what Guillermo intended when he coined “recursive founder mode”.