Child Coding Entrepreneur

Guillermo Rauch shares how he started his career as a child freelancer while hiding his age.

"I started coding very early. Seriously, I would say when I was 10 years old I was creating websites, shipping, and doing work online helping my parents with our home finances.

It was a lucky break in some ways, but through open source. I was contributing a lot to online forums, helping people out. The lucky part was this guy - I guess I'll never know his name, he was like 'dark shadow one two three' - he said, 'Hey, you seem to really enjoy helping people out by writing tutorials and guides. There's this freelancing website where you could sell your services because you know so many things about Linux and PHP and programming.'

So there was a bit of a lucky break in that I figured out a business model for myself really early on. I got my first check when I was like 11 years old and I had a client in the Netherlands when I was 12 or 13.

I wanted really badly for my age to never come up, and I'm lucky that at the time even Skype was not a thing, so it was actually kind of rare that you'd have to get on the phone. I really took advantage of that."