I'd suggest that aside from Perl you look pick up a language at something like Python or Ruby. Ruby would probably be a bit easier because it pulls some of its

I'd suggest that aside from Perl you look pick up a language at something like Python or Ruby. Ruby would probably be a bit easier because it pulls some of its influences from perl, although Python has a fairly gradual learning curve as well. There is always PHP. I know a number of companies looking for decent developers that know PHP. I think that brushing up on MySQL is a good idea. I'd also know startups are doing some pretty cool things with Postgres. I'm again guessing that going from Oracle to Postgres would be less of a jump than going from Oracle to MySQL. Also, I know a lot of founders, myself included would love to pick a DBA's brain. I'm in the middle of deciding how to model a complex data store right now. I'm toying with the idea of going to a NoSQL database, but that's primarily because I don't really know anyone that has a bunch of experience with this type of problem. All we hear as founder is "RDBMs's don't scale". I know a bunch of really smart guys from HackersandFounders meetups, but there aren't tons of them that have a huge amount of experience managing a lot of data with a lot of complex relationships. Or, the guys that do have tons of experience managing that kind of data work for Google and they can't talk about it. :P So, I'd suggest coming to the next http://HackersandFounders http://HackersandFounders .com meetup and letting me pick your brain. :) It's not that hard to get into the startup scene. Go to meetups like SV New Tech, Hackers and Founders or any number of technology specific meetups like the MySQL, Postgres javascript, Python, Rails, iPhone, etc... Hang out at the Hacker Dojo or NoiseBridge. Hand out business cards. Build a couple of simple web apps in your spare time and get people's opinions on them.