O1 : CEO GUILLERMO RAUCH from Vercel at OOO summit - The Flagship Entrepreneur & Founder #o1visa

because of the internet so it's making more money than my parents uh especially if you know about Argentina we have a really bad currency uh like the RG and peso is like badly damaged so I was kind of Rich by the time I was like 17 so at that point my parents making it relatable to people over here but anybody can do this for sure uh in 10 easy steps which is just grinding and writing a lot of code and whatever but yeah so the 01 Visa really was for

me and I was chatting with some people yesterday about this uh that was for me like Visa it was monumentally difficult but also huge accomplishment and gave me a lot of freedom to execute at the time it would help me stay here to build my first startup yep and it was hugely distracting it was really painful but it happened for for people that don't know um what is the 01 visa and how did you sort of get get get it yeah I guess only the United States can name a Visa like

this but it's the alien of extraordinary ability Visa it's ridiculous but it's fun at least it keeps you going like oh I have to meet all this 200 criteria but I will become an alien later so yes uh and yeah it had a lot of criteria one of which was uh you've given presentations uh different big forums or industry relevant forums and I was like oh I'm giving a lot of talks about software engineering every day day and then

letters of recommendation and then Awards and then being mentioned in mainstream media and then it kind of became you know what's interesting about this visa and maybe this is just me having PTSD it gave me a road map to noty in a way because it was like Hey you have to meet all this criteria I was like I think I can meet all that criteria so I went on and met the criteria which is awesome yeah it's hilarious um I think I don't know if you know Alex mcau run a company called theid he wanted to move to America so

and you read these criteria it's like okay write a book you spent 18 months writing a book so you could apply for the that's literally mean so there's a book that for a short period of time was bestseller on Amazon for software uh it's called The Smashing no. JS which s weird smashing OJs you don't smash a technology but that book uh I wrote it specifically so node is this JavaScript technology I was very involved in through the uh in the early days and I

was like simultaneously held two beliefs I hate books like as a software engineer I never write a book I never read a book I just Google or never read a book I didn't think I've ever read a book on sotw engineering oh okay when I was a little kid in Argentina I read a bunch of books because we didn't have good internet and we didn't even have content in Spanish so uh it was hard but today I just read everything online or or I asked CH or whatever so perfect but yeah

I wrote the book and I that's only one criteria they make it jump through a lot of books Uncle Sam is a is a tough tough man for for those of you listening to this by the way um you read the criteria they're very scary sounding but if you look at the data the approval rate right now for the first time is over 95% so if you can find a way to somehow fulfill the criteria most people are gaming it right now yeah I think I well I don't know if they're gaming it or I think there's also like attached to some inst I know a lot of people have burnt out

and it's just so grueling that they were like yeah this ain't for me like also America I have all this like self evident like data and accomplishments why you're making it so hard for me so it can be so frustrating it's interesting it can be more frustrating the more accomplished you are because you're like wait like do I have to like really go through this like I build all this stuff I mean not an equal amount of stress but I feel like immigrating to