Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#7

Post by dna_polymerase » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

- "ZEIT is now Vercel. This new identity aligns with our new focus — to provide the ultimate workflow for developing, previewing, and shipping Jamstack sites."

What did the person writing this smoke? And who reads this and doesn't think of the company as being full of shit? Also, rebranding this is an utterly stupid move. Why on earth would you take the Zeit Brand and rename it into this bullshit concoction of words that you now feel to include in your company's mission statement? You throw away so much brand power. Zeit is a real household name in the JS world, so much that even I know it, and I wouldn't touch JavaScript or JAMSTACK with a barge pole. Vercel is just a faceless hull.

Otherwise, congratulations on securing funding, you guys surely deliver a lot of value to a lot of developers and that's commendable.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#8

Post by swyx » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 10:53 AM UTC

congrats team! 21m series A is hefty even before coronavirus. Good to have locked it in.

I've been following this frontend-gets-fullstack-abilities trend for a while. I think Next.js is the best expression of this idea, and is truly the crown jewel of Vercel and also the React ecosystem.

Unlike other React distros like Gatsby or Create-React-App, Next.js is the first "hybrid" framework that lets you choose whether to deploy static or serverless pages on a per page level. This means you can ship features without being locked into app level architectural choices. Even static pages get a "Preview" mode, solving a key pain point for content workflow. (all with the caveat that you must use a hosting setup capable of supporting these features, and naturally Vercel is the best place to do that if you don't want to roll your own). A few months ago Dan Abramov noted[0]:

> The next wave of techniques won’t be about putting everything on the client. Or doing everything on the server. It will let you move code between them without friction, and adjust the tradeoff to the use case. Take advantage of both. The Middle Way.

I see Next.js as the way most of the ecosystem will experience this colocation of client and server concerns.

The other trend I see is that React is continuing to work on integrated client-and-server experiences. (Note: everything I discuss here are experimental projects by the React team, so should not be taken as an official roadmap). React Suspense's introduction [1] was strongly tied to Relay, which introduces a compiler that offers stronger client-server guarantees for working with GraphQL [2]. React Flight will offer streaming server side rendering [3], while React Blocks will offer a generic way to suspend on queries without such strong coupling to GraphQL [4].

I expect that Next.js will also be the first place most React devs experience these improvements (they may be more under the hood by the time it rolls out), and naturally Vercel benefits.

Lastly, it's also fun to speculate on the future of Vercel outside of being "hosted Next.js". Guillermo's blogpost [5] has the appealing tagline "AWS for frontend developers". How many of those great logos that run Next.js is Vercel actually capturing? Is Vercel appealing enough to them that they also host non-Next.js projects with Vercel? Can we view Vercel as a "No Code backend"? Can Vercel deepen its 3rd party integrations to become a true marketplace/aggregator of frontend demand for backend/api services? What, fundamentally, is Vercel selling other than bandwidth, serverless functions, and devops-as-a-service software? Maybe that's plenty.

---

references

0: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1193001108102373376

1: https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/11/06/building-great-user-expe...

2: https://dev.to/zth/relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-do...

3: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/dtsi1q/react_fligh...

4: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1239013168682274816

5: https://rauchg.com/2020/vercel

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#9

Post by harisvs-code » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 10:53 AM UTC

I really liked the zeit brand. Vercel not so much. I hope that the name grows on me, either way I dont care as long as the tech is great.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#10

Post by thrwaway69 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 10:54 AM UTC

Odd for them to change branding when zeit is so well known everywhere. And given their products have simple and non googleable names, people have been tagging now and next with zeit so it's googleable.

Good to see free personal plan tho.