Guillermo Rauch: Why Great Companies are Defined by How Many Things They Say No To | E1069

The job of a good VC will be to find a handful of the best companies in the world. We don't need to fight every battle. And this actually matters more as the company becomes more mature. You don't always have to be first, you have to be right.

(instrumental music) Guillermo, I'm so excited for this. As we said, I've wanted to make this happen for quite a while. So first, thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah, great to be here. Thank you so much.

Not at all, but I would love to start, you started developing at 10. Can you just walk me through, how did you first get into computers and what were you building at 10?

By the time I was 10, I already had a few false starts at programming. I would tell people like, "Getting into software engineering is really, really hard, and it takes a lot of trial and error to like really get into the groove." The first thing I ever did was creating websites, uh, for my passions and, and my interests when I was a kid. So, uh, at the time I think it was like Dragon Ball Z, and I was learning just enough HTML to be able to put up a, a website online. I would use a tool called Frontpage. You can say that my passion has always drawn me towards the web and publishing things online, and that's how the world has gotten to know me.

Uh, same for me. I mean, 3,000 podcasts in, I think we can definitely say that's the same. Y- you then dropped out of high school and moved to SF super young. How was this process? That's got to be a defining process for you, I guess.

(laughs) Yeah, yeah, that's a funny story because I would have never imagined that I would drop out of the high school that I spent so much blood, sweat, and tears getting into. I'm from Argentina, and, uh, there's two high schools in Argentina that are well-known. They're public high schools with an entry exam, which acts like a contest, and there's thousands of signups, lots of kids that, you know, have this dream of getting into these high schools because they're so prestigious. And I really worked my ass off t- to get into one of the two. I entered number 10 out of, you know, uh, everybody that signed up, and I had a, an amazing start. Uh, I was, I was a, you know, diligent student, but then my passion for studying math and linguistics basically got into odds with my work that I was already doing online and my reputation for software engineering in the open source community. So, I would basically, like, stay up all night, uh, during my early high school days (laughs) like, I had these two lives. I was trying to be the good student, and I was trying to also be the, you know, entrepreneur, freelance developer, open source contributor at night. And these things get more, and more, and more into conflict as the years, uh, went by. The high school had a, a pretty difficult entry exam, but then it got even harder as the years went by with like physics, chemistry, all these things. It had less and less time, and my work, my, my side hustles of open source and, and work were doing better as well, and I was also starting to help my parents financially with... I would like work online, get bounties for, uh, solving different, like, problems in like existing open source or, or, or private projects. So by the time I was almost ready to finish high school, one of the open source projects that I was developing at the time called MooTools, this you can call like my, my five minutes of fame was I got accepted to become a core contributor to this project, MooTools, which is quite foundational in the early days of JavaScript on the web. And a company in Switzerland picked it as their like primary framework to build a very innovative UI at the time. And then, as you can probably tell, like, my software engineering journey really took me toward the world of front end development, open source, and all these things, so I had to make a very tough choice at the time. I'm in Argentina, I'm 17, this company from Switzerland has invited me to do a kickoff for a project on site in Lausa in Switzerland, and out here I'm also trying to like... I had two subjects in high school that I needed to complete. One was, uh, Portuguese. For whatever reason, I could have chosen English as my supplemental subject. I chose Portuguese and then Argentinean history. And, uh, yeah, the, the, the... My path took me to, uh, actually lean more towards work. I flew to Switzerland, then that company opened an office here in SF, and once, once I got to know the, uh, startup world here in San Francisco, it was just a one-way street. I left everything behind, moved here, and here I am now.