Ep 61: High School Dropout to Billion-Dollar Startup; the Story of Guillermo Rauch & Vercel

for each 100 milliseconds that you slow down an e-commerce experience you have a one percent drop off in conversion and we've all experienced this when you're like on Instagram and you go to a product you need to buy it and and everything has to click for every tenth of a second you just slowly lose people like it's not just how fast it text loads is how fast it's interactive so it doesn't feel like you're clicking in it's yeah it's a credit card Auto completed automatically so our obsession is giving people at all these great companies in in institutions the best

possible tools to create great experiences for the customers thank you [Music] as they were talking to our friend Guillermo Guillermo's the CEO of versel a huge man of the web is built using the

Frameworks that verseilles created the Guillermo and his team have created he's a great story he's from Argentina he started helping people all over the world even as a 13 year old and just really extraordinary talents himself websites like Washington Post Under Armor Uber Mr Beast I'll use Guillermo he's a superstar excited to chat with him today Guillermo thanks for joining us today thank you glad to be here let's start off with your background you grew up in Argentina yeah right I grew up in the outskirts of Buenos Aires so kind of an hour away from the city and I would bus in every day to go to high school and uh less than an hour yeah wow yeah

it was uh it was an interesting area to grow up in not not a lot of computers in homes like my dad was the the guy that was always all about the future of software he had a vision for software is going to be a huge thing what do they do he was an Industrial Engineer my mom was a chemical uh Mr engineer and they both came from Fairly poor families but they were very proud that

by studying Engineering in particular they had an out and that was their their thing so it grew up in a fairly poor area were there parents from Argentina so side of my family was from Italy but um so my grandma's parents were from Calabria and they funny enough met in Argentina so they both emigrated uh in a ship and then from my dad's side German and a couple other things so a lot of folks in Buenos Aires have this diverse

uh immigrant backgrounds as well and what what led you to America what led you to come to the United States so my fondest memory is I was helping my mom out with her resume when I was a kid because I was all about she needs to have her own online resume it was like making websites for for different things and I remember how proud she was of the American multinational company that she worked in in Argentina uh it was called Fisher

Rosemount a subdivision of Emerson Process Management and she loved being a sales engineer for that company and and the things that she would tell me are like they just do things better they have better rigor for their engineering they have better specs it's funny a lot of things change over the decades and a lot of things stay the same like a lot of what we do at versel we take a lot of pride in the quality of our documentation uh and I think back in the time she was like basically telling me the

same thing like they're documenting things great and like she just had a lot of admiration for for that and she would always tell me if you just learn to speak English that'll be a huge Advantage for you I see it on my own company in Argentina like the people that can speak English and do Commerce and uh do customer support or help out a customer and like break that barrier so that was the thing that if I look back