- Dropped out of high school at 15. - First job working at a blueprint shop for minimum wage, collating paper and running printers. - Quit and got a job at Fa

- Dropped out of high school at 15. - First job working at a blueprint shop for minimum wage, collating paper and running printers. - Quit and got a job at Fastsigns, a sign shop, for $12/hr doing front desk/customer service. - Applied for the same role at another sign shop for a few dollars more an hour. Started learning photoshop and illustrator and running a phpBB forum in my spare time. - Started doing low-paid contract design and web dev jobs I found on Craigslist. - Quit to work on my own. Failed to pay rent. Needed help from my parents. - Got a job as an apartment manager, in exchange for free rent in a studio at the apartment complex. - Continued learning programming and web development, taking odd jobs and barely making enough money to live combined with the free rent from apartment managing. - Applied for a JS development position at a startup without knowing JS. They hired me after doing some free design work for them, and because I knew one of the devs that worked there. Quit my apartment management job. Continued freelancing on the side. - That startup failed, but at this point I knew a lot more. Applied for another software engineering startup and got a job working as a full stack engineer. - Fired from that job for being a dick and not working well with the team. (They went on to get acquired for 600 million and I missed out on probably 1 mil from that). - Continued freelancing. Started doing contract work for a hedge fund my friend was CTO at. - My friend left and I was offered VP engineering role there. - Quit because I hated 9-5. Planned to move to SE Asia to live off savings and start working for myself. - My friend had started a company and I thought it was cool so I joined as cofounder/CTO. Worked without pay for almost a year. - We raised $1 million in seed money and continued working on that almost two years. - I left because we were running out of money, I no longer believed in the vision, and was sick of SV culture. - I’m 32 now. Moved to SE Asia to Yangon, Myanmar and now working for myself, writing an ebook, and focused on building a company that I care about that sustains me. Along the way I learned PHP, JS, C, Ruby, Python, Haskell, SQL, *unix, management, marketing. Lessons I wish I learned sooner: Be nice to everyone, don’t wait for tomorrow to do what’s in your heart or your dreams, exercise and eat right.