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 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 a two 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 it was 10 I

already had a few false starts to the programming I always tell people like getting into software engineering is really really hard and it takes a lot of trial and error to 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 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 website online I

would use a tool called front page 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 but same for me I mean 3 000 podcasts in I think we can definitely say that's the same you then dropped out of high school and moved to SF super young how is this process that's got to be a defining process 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 the Republic high schools with an entry exam which acts like a contest and there's thousands of sign ups lots of kids that you know have this dream of getting into this high schools because they're so prestigious and I really worked my ass off to get into one of the two I entered number 10 out of you know uh everybody that signed up and I had an amazing start I was I was a you

know diligent student but then my passion for studying math and Linguistics basically got into Arts with my work that I was already doing online and my reputation for software engineering in the open source community so basically I could stay up all night uh during my early high school days like I had this 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 it years went by the high school had 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 with open source and and work were doing better as well and it 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 projects so by the time I was almost ready to finish High School one of the open source projects that I was developing on the time called moo tools is you can call it like my my five minutes of fame was I got accepted to become a core contributor to this project mood tools which is quite foundational in the early days of JavaScript on the web and the 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 the front and 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 invited me to do a kickoff for a project on site in Los Angeles Switzerland and out here I'm also trying to like I had two subjects in high school that I needed to