First "job"? Hmm, probably one of those phone book delivery schemes at the age of 13 in rural Virginia. Paid $7/hr, all said. I split the take with a few car

First "job"? Hmm, probably one of those phone book delivery schemes at the age of 13 in rural Virginia. Paid $7/hr, all said. I split the take with a few car-owning friends and paid them less of the commission than I got ($5/hr, maybe?) First business venture was selling polished salt crystals (that I'd found at the beaches of Dubrovnik pre-war, say 1990) to the parents of my classmates at a craft fair. I was 8 or so, and used an overhead projector covered with hole-punched mylar to illuminate them. Made a few Austrian Schilling that way. First Real Job was at 17 as a programmer/security analyst for a sleazy pay-per-click search engine in Thousand Oaks, CA. I got a $70k/yr salary and stock options, which I was slightly amused with at the time (having prefigured the dot-com phenomenon for a crash) and parlayed my low-paying position into a neat title. Of course, this did nothing to stop me from squandering the majority of my 20s on sex, drugs and very loud music.