In this episode, we sit down with Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, for an in-depth fireside chat covering the intersection of AI, developer experience (DX), and the evolving landscape of web development. Malte shares his journey from labeling floppy disks in northern Germany to leading engineering at Google Search, and now, shaping the future of developer tools at Vercel.

We dive into:

• How Malte got into computer science and his early work with Smalltalk and web pages

• The unique story of how he ended up at Google—and what happened on day one

• Lessons from building front-end infrastructure at Google, including the birth of frameworks used in nearly every Google product today

• The culture shift he experienced joining Vercel and rediscovering the joy of working with passionate teams

• Behind the scenes of Vercel’s AI SDK and the V0 product—how they were built, what worked, what didn’t, and how they’re being adopted

• Why Vercel chose a composite model architecture for AI, and how it enables fast iteration without training their own foundation models

• The shift to evals-driven development and how it’s changing how AI-native products are built and measured

• Opening Vercel's Berlin office and thoughts on the US vs. EU tech ecosystems

• Malte’s candid take on the current state (and future) of Google Search, and how LLMs are reshaping information retrieval

Whether you’re building AI products, using Next.js, or just curious about the future of developer tooling, this is an unmissable conversation with one of the industry’s most forward-thinking engineering leaders.