Not much education to talk of. As a kid I loved playing on my dads Atari console thing (the one with the wood panels!) and later he bought a Sinclair ZX81. For

Not much education to talk of. As a kid I loved playing on my dads Atari console thing (the one with the wood panels!) and later he bought a Sinclair ZX81. For a school project we were asked to create our own musical instruments and perform a song - I programmed a song using the BEEP command through trail and error. After that, we got an Amiga and I pretty much just used it to play games and do some pretty art things. In around '96 we got a PC with internet access and I started playing around creating batch files in DOS and some basic web pages. I created a pretty popular joke website that was getting quite a bit of traffic but didn't know enough to make the most of it. In '99 I started an apprenticeship with a company that did EPOS systems and spent a lot of time soldering serial cables. After about 6 months they let me go because I couldn't drive and they wanted someone who could go out and fix machines on site, so I got dumped. By this point, I was about 18 and I saw a job advert that simply said "Wanted: Internet Guru". I applied and it was basically this guy that had an existing business and wanted to get into this internet thing. I got the job and after a long talk we decided to set up a domain / hosting / web design company. He had some fax spam machine and sent out hundreds of faxes promoting domains at over £100 each (they're now more like £6 in the UK). We were flooded with responses and I spent a few days manually registering domains with our registrar before I realised I could automate most of it. After about a year, I left and got a job with a small startup as a domain administrator and learnt a lot more about web development. I'm still with that company ten years on even though the founders have cashed out for over £25 million. I'm now working on my own startup in my free time as I've been dreaming about being free from the rat-race for about 8 years now having seen other people making a mint from their own web startups - I'm finally doing something about it and focusing on my own future rather than making money for other people.