I was "lucky" in that my parents were so terrible with money that every year around tax time assuming we weren't homeless they'd head into Rent-A-Center and rent a computer for the house. If it weren't for that I never would have been exposed to start ups and programming. I didn't go to a real school, opting instead for some community college because the fear of debt and failure were too real, but the years of hustling, jail breaking peoples iPhones, designing sites for other local hustlers, and reading /. and digg meant I'd been exposed enough to the web that I had good js experience. Lucky twice because JS wasn't nearly as enterprise-y when I started wanting to work at start ups.