Note: This post is part of an extended auto-biography which is collected in my About page.
During college in 1995, I got hired for my first web-related job as the Site Architect and Webmaster for the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Besides being able to exercise my newly learned web programming skills, this job gave me a chance to meet and help business school faculty and students during the very beginnings of the Internet Boom, many who later went on to become internet entrepreneurs themselves. During my third-year of college, I also partnered with two friends to form Go! Designs, a web design boutique firm; we all moved in together into the same cramped Durant Avenue apartment and spent time away from class plugging away on assorted for-hire projects.
My senior year at Cal, between working a nearly full-time job at the business school and spending nights and weekends on my own web design firm, I had basically stopped attending college classes and let my grades pitifully decline, but the experience reinforced my conviction to continue a Internet start-up life post-college.