Perhaps the most favorite question in interviews — “How did you get into programming?”. Without a doubt, Guillermo Rauch would have found an answer to this question.
He was born in a small town in Argentina, did not finish school, went to work in Switzerland at the age of 17, and emigrated to the US at 18 to start implementing his ideas as an entrepreneur. He has founded several successful startups, created next.js, now.js and CLI hyperterm utilities, socket.js, and dozens of other open-source projects.
He has already presented several releases of next.js, and his company Vercel, after rebranding, attracted $313 million in investments and received a valuation of $2.5 billion, making it the 6th unicorn with Argentine roots.
This is an amazing and inspiring story, and in this part, I will tell you how it all began.
Family and Homeland
Rauch Guillermo Federico was born in Lanus in December 1990, in a family of engineer-technologists and chemists.
Lanus is part of the Buenos Aires conurbation and is also an industrial center. The city has chemical, military, textile, leather-rubber, and dozens of other types of industries. The city is home to several technical schools as well as a medical center.
Argentina was in a crisis at that time. The new government launched massive reforms (which even led to an attempted military coup in 1990), including a currency reform. These reforms quickly pulled the country out of the crisis, and by 1995, the inflation rate had normalized (4%).
Guillermo has an older brother, Ricardo Rauch, who later became the designer of two mega-unicorns in a row — Auth0 and Scale.
Education
In the early years of his education, he attended the Jose Manuel School, which was located near his home. During high school, he transferred to one of the most prestigious schools in Argentina — the Carlos Pellegrini High School, where his brother also studied.
“El Pellegrini introduced me to things that, perhaps, in another universe, I would have learned at university.”
During his school years, he was a fan of The Beatles and a regular customer of McDonald’s, loved mathematics and foreign languages. He was able to learn programming and English online but did not skip history and Portuguese since he left school at the age of 17.
In 2007 (when Guillermo was 16–17 years old), unique events took place at the Carlos Pellegrini School. After the resignation of the rector — Abraham Leonardo Gak, and the arrival of Juan Carlos Viegas, a crisis began at the school, resulting in the school being seized with the demand for a change of rector. During Juan Carlos Viegas’ tenure, the school received over 80 bomb threats.
First Steps in Programming
In 1987, one of the most famous TV series in America was captured — ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’. This part became the most popular in this universe, and a whole subculture grew around it — Trekkies. This series came to Argentina only in 1990 and, like in the rest of the world, it became very popular.The first computer appeared in Guillermo’s family when he was 7 years old. It had Windows 95.
His father was all about engineering and watched Star Trek. He understood that the future was with computers, so he bought new and advanced things for his family. He was also subscribed to the PC Users magazine. Occasionally, various components came with the magazine for subscribers.One day, Guillermo’s family received a CD-ROM on which Red Hat Linux was recorded. It interested Guillermo’s father, and he said they should try it out. It was a very early version, but the installation process was accompanied by a graphical interface, which made it painless.
The average nominal salary in Argentina at that time was ~$8200/year, which is less than $700/month. This amount also had to cover taxes, expenses, and support for two children. Computers at that time cost over $1300.Starting with exploring alternative operating systems, Guillermo became interested in performing operations in the console (and this interest has remained throughout the years). Since the Red Hat Linux version was not yet stable, there were problems with the internet, and in the beginning, Guillermo was busy fixing it. Then he communicated on various IRC forums, learning new things and sharing ideas. He then tried Debian (and he liked this system).
In 1998, Broadband Internet began to be gradually deployed in Argentina.At the age of 11, when time was divided between games and programming, one of Guillermo’s main hobbies was emulating games in Linux — installing Wine, configuring it, and optimizing it to the maximum metrics. He collected configurations, installed modules, rebuilt the kernel, looked at metrics, and then returned to debugging or, after much persuasion from his mother, finally gave the computer to her so she could send an email (in cases when he didn’t forget to add the ethernet module).
But the major turning point was the introduction to JavaScript (for which the ES3 version had just been released).
First Job and First Experience in Open Source
According to Argentine legislation, it was possible to get a job only at the age of 14 (currently 16).By the age of 13, he had mastered JavaScript to such an extent that he started working as a freelancer abroad and earned $1000 per week.
At the same age of 13, Guillermo met Richard Stallman (the main evangelist of the free internet, founder of the free software movement, GNU project, Free Software Foundation, and the League for Programming Freedom) in Buenos Aires, where Stallman gave a lecture on “Free Software and GNU/Linux.”
Since 2006, Guillermo had been running his blog. He used WordPress and the theme “Peaceful Rush” to create the blog. Also, since 2006, he had been working with MooTools — a newly created promising library. He actively participated in open source and answered questions on “a Spanish service similar to Stack Overflow.”
In 2007, at the age of 16, he developed a plugin called FancyMenu, thus becoming a core developer in MooTools. In the same year, he developed a plugin for WordPress — WP-o-Matic — a kind of admin panel for collecting articles from different blogs into one blog [read more].
Design for the plugin developed by Ricardo Rauch.
A year later, at the age of 17, thanks to the recommendation of another core developer, Aaron Newton, Guillermo was invited to work at a startup in Lausanne, Switzerland.
First Experience in Startups
Faced with the choice between education and starting work at startups, he chose the latter. He left school and decided to go to Switzerland.
He was also wanted by another company, already well-known to the public — Facebook.The company was developing a product on the MooTools framework and was looking for developers familiar with it. The most obvious way to find them was the list of core developers.
In 2008, GitHub was introduced, which updated and changed the world of open source.Companies created in those times worked side by side on new libraries, developing them and building communities. Collaborative development on many of them gave Guillermo many interesting and useful acquaintances for the future.
Two years after Guillermo’s invitation, the company decided to open its business in the US, in the mecca of IT startups — Silicon Valley (San Francisco).
Further Path
Seeing how the company achieved such a level in just 2 years, Guillermo realized that it was possible to create and develop a company from scratch, and that he could go this path and create something of his own.
At the age of 18, Guillermo emigrated to San Francisco, California, in 2009, where he decided to start his own path as an entrepreneur.
In California, together with partners, he started working on his first startup.
The next part will be published in a week, on November 24th.