I started my own company (to be a freelancer) at age 18 when I went to uni. I had a family friend who was a programmer who I teamed up with. After uni I joine

I started my own company (to be a freelancer) at age 18 when I went to uni. I had a family friend who was a programmer who I teamed up with. After uni I joined IBM as a graduate. I kept freelancing in my spare time and helped my brother build a successful e-commerce company over the past 11 years. In 2012 I left full time employment and continued freelancing to two regular clients. In 2013 I built an MVP to be notified of changes on a web page, and while at an E-commerce trade show, I asked the CEO of a company exhibiting the question about how they get client e-commerce products into their system without any technical integration. This resulting in me creating a second MVP to scrape e-commerce data for retailers wanting to sell on marketplaces. The CEO spent the following 6 months convincing me to be their CTO, which I've been doing for the past 2.5 years now. So yeah, my future changed very drastically based on me deciding to wait a few more minutes to see if the CEO was free to have a chat. I could easily have walked away instead. Still looking forward to that feeling of 'success' but I know I've moved a long way over the years. I've learnt that if you focus on building up a network of contacts and actually getting to know them, you give yourself many more opportunities than you would otherwise have. However, except with my getting into IBM, my university education hasn't played a significant role. Owning my own company, doing real work and continually learning and building has been critical.