How I built a $3B AI Startup + 7 AI Business Ideas

**Guillermo Rauch** (0:00)
I've been an engineer for a couple of decades now, and I no longer write code. I only prompt.

**Shaan Puri** (0:15)
All right, so you founded this company, but your story's crazy. So your high school dropout grew up in Argentina, have been building things and hacking on things since a very young age. Sold a company kind of early on, I don't know if it's big sale or small sale, 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, whatever, give or take, and you've just done this incredible thing. Now you have this AI tool that's also super on trend and is something that is doing really, really well. It's a really cool agent that builds sites for you.
That's my version of the summary of your story.

**Guillermo Rauch** (0:58)
It's a great summary. Maybe the only thing I'll add is that the crazy way that I've been able to go from a teenager in Argentina to today has been a lot of open source. So I've been involved in creating a lot of technologies that have 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.

**Shaan Puri** (1:22)
Well, explain that. So why did you drop out of high school?

**Guillermo Rauch** (1:24)
I've never been a fan of 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. It 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. Entered in position number 10 out of 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.

**Shaan Puri** (1:55)
You were becoming popular in open source, but you're only 15, 16 years old. So when did you start?

**Guillermo Rauch** (2:01)
Started coding very early. You know, seriously, I would say when I was 10 years old. I was creating websites, shipping, I started doing work online, helping my parents with our home finances.

**Shaan Puri** (2:13)
Was it just a lucky break or what got you started?

**Guillermo Rauch** (2:15)
Lucky break in some ways, but open source, so I was contributing a lot to online forums, helping people out. And the lucky part was I remembered this guy whose name I guess I'll never know. It was like Dark Shadow123. 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 I was like 11 years old.
I had a client in the Netherlands when I was like 12 or 13

**Shaan Puri** (2:56)
Are you pretending to be an adult or are you openly like I'm 11?

**Guillermo Rauch** (3:01)
I wanted really badly for it to never come up. I'm really lucky that at the time even Skype was not a thing. So it was actually kind of rare that you have to get on the phone. So I really took advantage of that.
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. I would get to the front page of dig.com. I would write open source software. I would get a lot of traction. I would get written up.

**Shaan Puri** (3:40)
Give me a sense. Are you, I'm just saying 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?

**Guillermo Rauch** (3:49)
Right, right.

**Shaan Puri** (3:50)
Or was it like you were figuring things out and really cutting edge stuff? Where were you?

**Guillermo Rauch** (3:54)
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 RPPPO to get internal connectivity in Linux. And it's just like writing down the drill, today HHGBT will do a hundred times better job, right? Or like at best it becomes training data for an AI to then explain it back to people. But then over time, I started coming up with my own breakthroughs. And so my quote unquote big break was, I started contributing to a library called Mootools when I was 15, 16 years old and this library got picked up by Facebook to become sort of the inspiration slash foundation for their JavaScript infrastructure.