Guillermo Rauch has said he grew up in a pretty poor area of Argentina, in a suburb outside Buenos Aires where few families owned a computer. One day his father brought one home and handed him and his brother a challenge.
The challenge came from a magazine. His father had bought an issue about free software, and the boys were dared to replace Windows with Linux. Rauch started with Red Hat, then moved to Debian. There were few Spanish-language guides. He taught himself to code, and to read English, because the answers were in English.
His father had bought an issue about free software, and the boys were dared to replace Windows with Linux.
What almost nobody notices is where his first friends were. An IRC channel run by his internet provider gave him a community of people who knew things, and he credits it with changing how he thought about software. Around eleven or twelve, a stranger told him that code could earn money. He started his first business at eleven. At thirteen, one profile says, he was building sites for clients around the world.
Open source did the rest. He answered questions on forums where a leaderboard counted the top answerers. His work on a UI library, MooTools, built a name. His teenage demos reached the front page of Digg, and he has described becoming a five-minute internet celebrity. Facebook contacted him while he was still a teenager in Argentina. He has said open source was his path out of the country.
He dropped out of high school, moved to the Bay Area at around eighteen, and started a company. He sold it to Automattic, and he has admitted to being a little sad at the time, as if letting my baby go. Then, in 2015, ZEIT, which became Vercel in 2020. What drove it was a memory: his first attempt to put a simple website online took three or four weeks. How, he asked, have we made the cloud so hard to use?
The company he built answered that question with Next.js, and investors agreed. $250 million at $3.25 billion in May 2024, then $300 million at $9.3 billion in September 2025.
There is a price for being visible. A selfie with Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2025 triggered a boycott from some developers. In April 2026 the company disclosed that attackers reached some internal systems through a third-party AI tool.
The boy who started with a hand-me-down computer and a magazine dare still describes his work the same way: take something hard and make it feel simple. A first-time founder can take the quiet part, which is that his advantage was a poor neighborhood with an open door onto the internet, and he walked through it.