The Argentine kid who learned English from software manuals

Transcript

This kid taught himself English from software manuals at 11. Today, his company is valued at $9.3 billion. Meet Guillermo Rao. In the 1990s, Guillermo grows up in La Nus, a working class corner of Buenos Aires. Then his father brings home a PC and challenges his sons to figure it out. The manuals only exist in English, so Guillermo learns English to read them. And at 11, he codes a website that pays in five pesos for every shopper it refers. It works, and to a kid in Argentina, it feels like infinite money. As a teenager, he starts giving his coat away for free. At 17, he drops out of school, and at 18, the code gets him hired in San Francisco. He builds a startup, sells it to the company, behind WordPress, and keeps giving coat away. Then in 2016, he releases his biggest giveaway. Next.js, a free tool that makes websites easier to build. Walmart builds its site on it, so does TikTok, so do millions of developers. It's genius, but it earns him nothing because it's open source. So Guillermo builds Versel, the cloud where next.js runs best. The tool stays free, but websites need somewhere to run. And the millions using his free tool need his paid cloud. Then AI starts writing the world's websites, and those tools launch on Versel as a preferred solution. Revenue triples in two years from $100 million to $340 million. Today, Versel is valued at $9.3 billion, and Forbes reports the kid from La News is a billionaire.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.