The other day I was talking to Reno, and he told me that many startup founders have some competitive streak tied to games.

He, for example, was Chile’s Catan champion. My cofounder plays competitive PvP in Minecraft—player versus player, the mode where two players compete directly against each other.

Apparently, it is a pretty common pattern.

During the pandemic, I got quite good at COD Mobile. We made it into Chile’s top 10 without spending money on the game.

Because I didn’t have any. Otherwise…

I have several stories like that, but there is one part of that competitiveness that has followed me throughout my life: when I couldn’t win the normal way, I looked for another one.

Does great power come with great responsibility?

I started programming in Java when I was 11, with the typical courses you could find on YouTube.

Honestly, I cried.

It was really hard. Fair enough—I was 11.

So I put it aside and kept playing a lot of GTA V on the PS3.

In GTA V Online, I had no in-game money because I had no idea how to start a heist. To make matters worse, some player would show up and kill you 22 times in under five minutes.

I reacted in the way we Chileans call picarse.

I’m very picota, as we say when someone takes losing far too seriously—especially when I’M the one who fails.

I wasn’t angry at the player who had killed me so many times. I was angry at myself because I hadn’t been able to play better.

Then I remembered something I had seen many times.

Games have hackers, right?

How do they do it?

Code.

I started researching the underworld of cheats: programs or modifications that give you advantages the game does not normally provide.

I joined forums like UnKnoWnCheaTs and V3rmillion, communities where people shared techniques, code, and tools for modifying games. That is where I started building my first mod menus, modified menus loaded inside the game that let you activate features GTA did not offer by default.

That is how I ended up learning C, C++, and C#.

There was a problem—or perhaps an advantage—to learning that way.

Whenever you shared your code to ask for help, the threads would fill up with racist, xenophobic, sexist insults, and anything else you can imagine.

But one showed up especially often:

Skiddie.

It was a name for a script kiddie: someone who copied code or used tools made by others without understanding how they worked.

To avoid being called that, you had to understand what you were doing. Your code had to be clean, and even then the more advanced users could find twenty things to criticize.

Eventually, I got there.

I made my first mod menu for GTA V Online on PS3 and started winning the fights I used to lose.

After a while, that stopped being fun.

There wasn’t much satisfaction in beating a normal player when I had an advantage. The fun became running into another hacker and trying to improve my own tools enough to beat them.

Squeaker

Then I discovered Roblox.

I’m sure many people reading this blog know it. Roblox is everywhere today, but back then, to me, it was simply another game I could tinker with.

The story repeated itself.

I started programming cheats in C# and discovered that you could do some pretty absurd things.

At the time, you could create an enormous number of server-side instances—objects the server itself had to create and process—until it crashed.

You could also run scripts, small programs containing instructions, and make your actions affect other players’ experience.

It was wild.

At some point, I ended up joining a group of exploiters, the name used in that community for people who looked for vulnerabilities or game behaviors they could take advantage of to do these kinds of things.

The group was called NONSENSE DIAMOND.

We had a public exploit, a tool that let people run their own scripts inside Roblox, which became moderately well known.

We also sold a more complete and up-to-date version in exchange for Monero, a cryptocurrency focused on privacy.

That was the first time I earned income by developing software.

I didn’t think too much about it at the time. We had built a program, people were interested in using it, and some of them were willing to pay us.

I cheat in games.

Bad grades

I always had bad grades, both in elementary school and high school.

As you have probably gathered, a bad grade felt like losing to me, and I took it pretty hard.

My parents never demanded excellent grades. As long as I passed, that was enough.

I was the problem.

I wanted good grades so I could show them to my classmates and be part of that competition.

So I decided to hack the grading system.

At the time, we used the infamous Kimche, the platform my school used to manage grades and other academic information.

This time, we used social engineering and a few RATs.

Social engineering means gaining access or information by exploiting a person instead of attacking the system directly. A RAT, short for Remote Access Trojan, is a type of malware that allows someone to control a computer remotely.

The truth is, I never changed my grades.

I ended up showing a teacher what we had found. Then I made it to the principal, and eventually I found myself giving cybersecurity talks at schools.

I had started because I was upset about my grades and ended up learning something else.

I cheat

Yes, I cheat.

These days, that habit shows up in far less questionable ways.

I like finding the limits of things, understanding how they work, and seeing what possibilities appear once you start asking questions.

I get bored a lot, and when I get bored, I start questioning things.

Why does this work this way?

What happens if I do it differently?

Often, I don’t find anything interesting. Other times, I end up discovering a new possibility, building something, or even making money from it.

The habit goes back to when I was 11, trying to understand how a player could kill me 22 times in GTA.

First came the mod menus. Then Roblox, Kimche, and many other things that will probably end up in another essay.

Today, I keep doing the same thing with software, products, and companies.

I look at the rules, try to understand why they exist, and search for what I can do within them.

Yes, I cheat.