Myself, I’ve been an engineer for like, you know, a couple decades now, and I no longer write code. I only prompt.
The Origin Story [00:12]
Shaan Puri: All right, so you’ve 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 a big sale or small sale, and then you built this product that has just taken off. Every front-end developer right now 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 is something that is doing really, really well. It’s a really cool agent that that builds sites for you. That’s my version of the of the the summary of your story.
Guillermo Rauch: 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 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 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: Well, explain that. So why did you drop out of high school?
Guillermo Rauch: 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 that high school in Argentina was 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.
Shaan Puri: You were like becoming popular at an open source, but you’re only 15, 16 years old. So when did you start?
Guillermo Rauch: I started coding very early, like, uh, 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 like home finances.
Shaan Puri: Was it just a lucky break or what got you started?
Guillermo Rauch: 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.
Shaan Puri: Are you pretending to be an adult or are you openly like I’m 11?
Guillermo Rauch: I never gave my I never gave I wanted really badly for you to never come up and I’m really uh 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 and notability in the world was growing. So I would write the articles, I would get to the front page of digg.com, I would write open source software that would get a lot of traction, I would get written up.
Shaan Puri: And give give me a sense. Are you, I’m going to say 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, right? Or was it like you were figuring things out and really cutting edge stuff? Where were you?
Guillermo Rauch: 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 internet connectivity in Linux. It’s like it’s just like writing down the tutorial. Today, ChatGPT would do a 100 times better job, right? Or like at best it becomes training data for an AI today to then explain it back to people. But then over time, I started coming up with my own breakthroughs. And so I I 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/foundation for their JavaScript infrastructure. And I got a job offer from Facebook when I was like 17 years old.
Shaan Puri: Did you turn it down?
Guillermo Rauch: Well, when they discovered I was in Argentina and under age, I was like, “Oh yeah, maybe we should look for someone else.” But that same project kept opening up up doors for me because other startups started using the same foundation and they were like, “Hmm, who should we hire?” And the first thing you think of is, “I’m going to hire the people that contribute to the project.” We do that ourselves today with our open source projects, like Next.js. We go and like, “Okay, who’s contributing?” Like, “Hmm, that person seems really interesting.” So when I was about 18, that’s when this startup from Switzerland reached out and saying, “Hey, like, we want to hire a MooTools developer.” And that’s when I basically just dropped out of high school. Like, I I I had my first real job offer from a company in Lausanne, Switzerland. And for my parents, for myself, it was kind of surreal, right? Like I’d never left the country, and I was like leaving Argentina for the first time with a job offer in hand at a like an amazing country, you know? So it was kind of surreal.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I I we hired a kid when I was doing a startup in San Francisco, we had a guy who was in eighth grade and he emailed me, Johnny Dallas, and he said, “Hey, I love to code. I my dad met somebody, I met Pete at a dog park, this our sys admin guy.” And he was like, um, “I don’t know anyone else who codes. Can I just come hang out for the summer? I just want to be around other programmers.” And I was like, “Oh man, amazing. Yes, for sure.” He comes in, first day, we just actually give him a test. We’re like, “Hey, we want you to make this little onboarding quiz. HTML, just make a quiz, like multiple choice, take them down a flow and land them in one of these four buckets.” And he just sits there and he scissors it to like seven or eight at night. I feel bad, like, but he’s like not asking for help. I just want to see how it plays out. And he actually ships the quiz at the end of the the the evening. I was like, “All right, this kid’s legit.” By the time he’s in 10th grade, we’re like, “This guy’s, you know, he’s working basically full-time for us.” He’s after school, he’s coming in. And so we had this, um, I had a conversation with his mom, I remember at the like downtown, and she’s like, “I can’t imagine my son being like a high school dropout.” And I said, “Do you know LeBron James and Kobe Bryant?” I was like, “Your son is going pro.” And so I think that should be a little bit of a Yeah, totally. If any kid is listening to this, it worked like a charm on on that mom. Try this on your mom or try this on on anybody where you can really go pro early.
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, totally. I I always give people very caviated advice, right? Like I tell them, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The Power of JavaScript [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right? Like by that time it was really clear that my my skills were going to take me somewhere. I didn’t know specifically I was going to get in I was eventually going to end up in San Francisco building companies, but um, you know, it was it was a bit of a leap of faith. I was well substantiated in existing evidence of success.
The “V0” Idea [08:49]
Shaan Puri: You talk about MooTools and you talk about JavaScript. I read something great that you said. You you go, “I kind of bet on JavaScript because I realized that for the back end, there’s, you know, 100 different languages you could choose, but the the browsers only know JavaScript, right?”
Guillermo Rauch: It’s like an unfair advantage. Looking back, I think you you always arrive to success by finding asymmetries or finding alpha or finding unfair advantages. And JavaScript has this unfair advantage that and and I can explain how it won as well, but right now, every single device on the planet on the client inside a web browser can run one language, and that language is JavaScript. It can’t run Python, it can’t run C++, it can’t run Java. Right. And the way that JavaScript got there was actually by beating a lot of alternatives. So way back in the day, we had Macromedia Flash as a proprietary plugin that Steve Jobs put to rest eventually with the iPhone. Was he right on that by the way? Was his taste correct? Absolutely. We had Java Applets, right? So there was an idea that the JVM, Java was going to be that universal language. And the fact that when I started going deep into JavaScript, there was there was still a little bit of a perception of like, “Hmm, it’s like a toy.”
Shaan Puri: Why was that? Why was it because okay, I’m a mostly non-technical person, but I I love you see I love situations like this where like there was 100 contenders in one wins, but it doesn’t win because it had the obvious traits of what you would think would win. But there’s this other thing that actually proved to be a big advantage. You know, we were just talking about like mid-journey before this, uh, and we’re like, mid-journey like it’s not like the product design, it’s not like somebody some designer sat down. Then you’ll open up Discord and there’ll be 100 random channels and in it will be strangers making images, but actually bad was better. Bad was good because you learned how to use it by seeing other people. Have you heard of the essay “Worse is Better”?
Guillermo Rauch: Uh, not worse. I haven’t seen worse is better. I’ve seen the Paul Graham one where he’s like, “Uh, if you’re great, you don’t have to be good.” I think it’s maybe similar. But can you explain worse is better?
Guillermo Rauch: Yeah, worse is better was a paradigm in the early days of the internet of um it specifically that essay spoke about worse in the sense of less powerful because sometimes when you constrain a technology, you make it a lot more predictable. And so there were some advantages to like markup languages that made them worse but better and became the the successful foundation of the internet. But there’s a broader point that Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has pointed out, which is that sometimes the success of technologies or startups can be best understood through the lens of evolution and natural selection and Darwinism, rather than like the obvious quote unquote intelligent design. So there was an article that he shared at one point called “What would Charles Darwin think about clean slate architectures?”
Shaan Puri: Okay.
Guillermo Rauch: And so JavaScript was almost like a piece of DNA that evolved and became more sophisticated over time, but started out looking very simple, small. It was a piece of code that you would inline into the markup. So we when you think about markup in the sense of like MySpace codes or like HTML, it was like, “Can we bring HTML slightly more alive?” Okay, so we need something that’s very minimalistic that we can put right there inside the markup code. And from there, it became more powerful, more sophisticated, but most people when they looked at it in the beginning, they were like, “Well, it can’t be fast, it can’t be typed, it can’t be correct, it can’t scale, it can’t have a module system.” But all of these observations that people were making were not actually paradoxically, they were not quite technical. They were like, “Well, at that point, as it exists at that time, it cannot do those things.” So a lot of the alpha that I created in my career was by actually taking it seriously and saying, “Look, I went to a high school that was giving us college-level content. So I actually developed a good foundation, a good quote unquote world model. I was I became quite competent in a lot of sciences, and we had really good chemistry classes, physics, math, etc. So I’m actually really thankful that I had a good foundation. And then by the time I decided not to continue down like the normal quote unquote educational career, I had a really good alternative, right?