I started my hosting company in 2001. If you were in the Valley at the time, you'd know it was a terrible time to be there. No one was hiring. I am a college dr

I started my hosting company in 2001. If you were in the Valley at the time, you'd know it was a terrible time to be there. No one was hiring. I am a college dropout and had no degree. I sent literally hundreds of resumes out to every conceivable tech company. Never even got a call back. Newspapers (remember those?) were full of smug pundits telling us "The Internet is dead!" or "The Internet is a fad!" Huge companies were going bust by the day. This was the way I made it work. I wasn't about to go back home to Indiana and live with my parents again, so I hustled. 2001 was a totally different timeframe and mindset than exists now in the tech industry. It's easy to look back, 11 years later, and say "It's easy" or "Startups get valuations 10x higher than that pre-revenue" or "She could have just gone to Google and made that much money." None of that was happening in the tech bust of 2001.