I’m A $3B Founder Here Are 7 AI Business Ideas
AI Hustle Lab
Channel
Interviewed Person
Guillermo Rauch
Description
Want to build the next unicorn? Get the cheat sheet here: https://clickhubspot.com/e1e885 Episode 711: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Guillermo Rauch ( https://x.com/rauchg ) about building Vercel plus 7 business ideas to start in AI. — Show Notes: (0:00) Dropout to job offer from Facebook (3:38) Genius vs accident (21:04) Building Vercel (25:26) AI startup ideas (31:38) IDEA: V0 for Video Games (33:09) IDEA: Doom CAPTCHA (40:04) IDEA: AI Typeform (46:54) IDEA: AI Camera (54:06) IDEA: Auto Complete (58:51) IDEA: Granular V0 — Links: • Guillermo Rauch - https://rauchg.com/ • Vercel - https://vercel.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC
Transcript
myself. I've been an engineer for like, you know, a couple decades now, and I no longer write code. I only prompt. [Music] All right. So, you founded this company, but your story is crazy. So, you're high school dropout, grew up in Argentina, have been building things and hacking on things since, you know, a very young age. Sold a company kind of early on. I don't know if it was big or small. And then you built this product that has just taken off. Every front end developer I know loves it. It's valued,
I don't know, $3 billion or so, you know, whatever, give or take. And you've just done this incredible thing. And now and now you have this AI tool that's also like super on trend and it's something that is doing really really well. It's a really cool uh agent that that builds sites for you. That's my version of the of the the summary of your story. It's a great summary. Maybe the only thing I'll add is the the crazy way that I've been able to go from like a teenager in Argentina to today was has been a lot of open source.
So I've been involved in creating a lot of technologies that have been become foundational in the tech ecosystem and I felt like that and the web has sort of been my ticket to success of course over decades of hard work. Well, explain that. So why did you drop out of high school? I I I've never been a fan of like the high school dropout moniker because I actually really loved the high school that I went to. So, it was a high school in Argentina that was a free public school that had an entry exam. You had to study really hard to
get in and I worked so hard to get in. Uh entered in position number 10 out of like thousands of students. But I had two competing interests. I was becoming popular in this open source ecosystem because I was creating libraries for JavaScript and front-end development. You're like becoming popular at in open source but you're only 15 16 years old. So when did you start? Started coding very early like uh you know seriously I would say when I was 10 years old. Uh I was creating websites
shipping and I started doing work online helping my parents with our uh like home finances. Was it just a lucky break or what got you started? lucky break in some ways, but um open source. So, I was contributing a lot to like online forums uh helping people out. And the lucky part was I remember this guy who whose name I guess I'll never know. It was like Dark Shadow 123. He's like, "Hey, you seem to really enjoy helping people out by writing tutorials and guides and things like that. There's this website. It's a freelancing website. You could
just sell your services here because you know so many things about Linux and PHP and programming." So there was a bit of a lucky break in that I figured out a business model for myself really early on. I got my first check when when I was in like 11 years old and started I had a client in the Netherlands when I was like 12 or 13. Are you pretending to be an adult or are you openly like it never I wanted really badly for it to never come up. And I'm really I guess lucky that at the time like even Skype was not a thing. So it was like actually
kind of rare that you have to get on the phone. So I really took advantage of that. But so when I got into this high school, my reputation for doing all of this work and then my reputation in the open source world were both growing simultaneously. So as my grades were decaying, my sort of online net worth and contribution and notability in the world was growing. So I would write
articles that would get to the front page of dick.com. I would write open source software that would get a lot of traction. I would get written out. Give me a sense. Are you I'm just going to say it in a dumb way. Like are you a genius or you were just being extremely helpful? Like was it just like nobody was writing the tutorial on how to host your WordPress site or whatever? Like was it like you were figuring things out really cutting edge stuff? Where were you? Yeah. When I advise young people on like how to bootstrap their careers, I say start by teaching anything. So I started with like how to compile. There was a project called RPPO
Video Details
- Duration
- 1:14:09
- Published
- July 14, 2025
- Channel
- AI Hustle Lab
- Language
- ENGLISH
- Views
- 33
- Likes
- 0