After leaving Automattic in 2015, Guillermo founded a new company — Zeit. Co-founders were Tony Kovanen and Naoyuki Kanezawa.
The main task of the company was to provide developers and teams with the ability to easily develop, preview, and deploy their applications.
“One of my dreams is that the next Facebook or Snapchat will be created by someone who didn’t have to go through all this training, develop these connections, and hire these bright people. It could be a girl from Africa or a boy from Bangladesh” — Guillermo Rauch.
This part will discuss the most uncertain period in the history of Vercel — the time when the company was becoming known to the community and fading from investors’ view.
Zeit first became known thanks to its product Now — a tool for deploying applications with a single command from the terminal, allowing developers to easily assemble their projects and instantly share them.
Now
The utility’s purpose was simple: You type “now” in the command line and get a new server. This concept is basically inherited by Vercel and even described in its main slogan “Develop. Preview. Ship”.
After entering the command, within a second, a new instance of the application is created and published on the Internet. You can share the link to the published application immediately, even before the build is completed — initially, the build process will be displayed on it, and then the application itself.
Guillermo described the procedure as follows:
- We take package.json, Dockerfile, or static files, publish them in the cloud, and serve them securely over HTTP/2.
- Each deployment is immutable and has its unique URL. They look like this: https://rauchg-blog-hhafwnefgw.now.sh/.
- To go into production, you just assign them domains. Simply, with one command: now alias rauchg-blog-hhafwnefgw.now.sh rauchg.com.
An application for PC — “Now Desktop” was also created for the utility. The utility itself supported the publication of static sites, next.js applications, as well as applications on go, php, node.js, python, rust, and other options.
Next, a global DNS solution — “Zeit World” was created.
HyperTerm
The Now utility had its page on the company’s website. At the very beginning of this page, there was a demo of its work in the terminal. And what is interesting here is not so much an example of work, but the fact that the terminal was added not as a gif, but written in pure html, css, and js.
Guillermo liked the demo result, as it looked like the simplest terminal. Then he thought about a new project — Hyper.app. The development of the first version took about two weeks. The terminal, like most other company projects, was published in open access and immediately after a quick presentation attracted the attention of developers — they began to actively participate in the development of the utility and soon more than 100 plugins were written for the terminal.
HyperTerm itself was created on Electron. This allowed you to open the developer console at any time and make various changes. You can also install ready-made plugins, many of which are collected in a special list.
The terminal is still highly popular (gihub, website).
Next.js
In 2016, Zeit released Next.js — a framework for creating Jamstack-style websites. The framework page lists the authors: Tim Neutkens, Naoyuki Kanezawa, Guillermo Rauch, Arunoda Susiripala, Tony Kovanen, Dan Zajdband. All but Dan worked at Zeit. Dan is familiar with Guillermo from JSConf Argentina, and probably as a developer of The Lift company (which used cloudUp, Guillermo’s second startup).
Next.js was initially released as an open source project on GitHub on October 25, 2016. The framework offers out-of-the-box server-side rendering, static site generation, API routes, and more. The goal was to provide critical features that React lacks — primarily in terms of speed and SEO optimization.
“We work for those who do front-end design to make e-commerce sites, media and everything else better… Everything should look good, sites should load quickly” — Guillermo Rauch
Today, Next.js is used by Uber, Amazon, Open AI, and thousands of other companies. Being a framework for React, Next.js has become an important part of the ecosystem — “NextJS takes it to a new level. And now many ideas from NextJS inspire React itself”.
Zeit Platform
Despite the fact that applications were published through the Now utility — it was just a part of the Zeit platform.
After entering the platform, you could publish up to 3 applications for free through Now.
However, you could not link domains in the free tariff. This was a paid feature, the price started from $15, and, for example, support cost from $750 to $2000. Also, you could buy domains directly in the platform.
The pricing policy was changed in December 2018 and, most importantly, limits on the number of applications and linked domains were removed, and for many categories, the price was calculated based on the resources spent over the limits. It lasted until the end of 2019, when it was changed again and fixed tariffs from $20 appeared.
Co-founders
Guillermo Rauch
In addition to the utilities mentioned in the article, Guillermo participated a lot in conferences and presented Now and Next.js. Also during this period, he was a mentor for the “Open Source Engineering” course organized by Stanford.
Tony Kovanen
Tony worked with Guillermo at Automattic and mainly worked on the Jetpack plugin. He left Automattic with Guillermo and became a co-founder of Zeit. In it, he will hold the position of CTO.
At Zeit, Tony participated in the development of next.js and Now. He worked until 2017, after which he will move to Gatsby. Now Tony is working on the Based.ioBased.io platform.
Naoyuki Kanezawa
Naoyuki was one of the main developers of Socket.IO and Engine.IO (created by Guillermo).
Now Naoyuki remains part of the Vercel team in the position of Infrastructure/Backend Developer.
Team
From the team it is worth noting:
Tim Neutkens, creator of Micro and MDX;
Arunoda Susiripala, creator of React Storybook;
Igor Klopov, creator of Pkg;
Nathan Rajlich, creator of node-gyp;
Javi Velasco, creator of React Toolbox.
Nicolas Garro / Evil Rabbit, Founding Designer and Brand Architect.
Zeit Day
Also, the Zeit company organized one-day conferences — “Zeit day”, the first of which took place in 2017.
Investments
Zeit can be called a failure in terms of investments — in essence, the company was not perceived as a startup and this was its main problem. So, one of the investors in the future Vercel company — CRV — said when investing in the latter that they are “glad to resume business with Guillermo, after he returned to the path of entrepreneurship and founded Vercel”.
Actually, this was one of the main reasons for the rebranding that happened. And soon Vercel will become Guillermo’s first unicorn (and the sixth unicorn with Argentine roots).