[DesertCat]

Bored in college, saw an ad for a Macintosh programmer, $8 per hour! Immediately I quit school and took the job. Small startup that was one of the first Mac software companies, I got to do all sorts of jobs besides programming, run tech support, testing, trade shows, etc. After hitting rock bottom company turned around and I was a big part of it, having written some of our leading products. But new CEO didn't see my value in the same way (i.e. no equity). After three years of working 12 hour days I quit and took a job at Apple, still broke.

Spent a couple years in the valley and made the mistake of turning down some nice startup jobs. Pierre Omidyar worked in my group just before me, left to start EBay.

Finally moved back to Oregon to work for a local software company, figured out it was really screwed up after a couple months. A friend of mine who cofounded the original company had sold it and was putzing around, we took turns trying to come up with a new business idea, and he came up with a good one, developing software for desktop publishing professionals. I convinced him to fund it with me as head of development. We grew it from 2 people to 24 in a couple of years, making us fastest growing company in Oregon, raised three rounds of VC money, grew it to 120 people by year six. I wanted to sell it, my partner wanted to be CEO of a public company. I finally couldn't take it any more, and quit. Still broke, but now owned some equity.

I started another company in the internet radio market. Raised angel funding, then a small VC round. We became the leader in our business, and ended up taking $12M from Nielsen Media (the TV people). Meanwhile the DTP company got sold to an internet company for over $100M, unfortunately, only $10M in cash. Of course the stock market collapsed and so did the stock we got, but I was still left with a nest egg of about four years salary.

My internet business collapsed when all it's customers (internet broadcasters) did same. I quit, moved from the heavy rain and taxes in Oregon to Arizona and decided to work at investing my small nest egg full time as value investor. That was 4 years ago. I've more than quadrupled my net worth in that time span, and can comfortably live well without needing a job.

Of course I'm still bored. So some former coworkers and I are now developing a company to provide internet based investment research support tools to professional investors.