At the time I was living in Houston, where I didn't have much of a network, so I packed up my stuff and moved back to San Antonio. I attended college in San Antonio and at least had some contacts there, mostly revolving around the coworking center Geekdom.
No job but I had enough savings to float myself for a few months.
A friend of mine from there put me in touch with a startup he had invested in—they were still in Techstars and he knew they needed an engineer. I contracted with them for a bit and joined up full time after they graduated and raised a seed round. Arguably they risk was theirs as their first engineering hire was a fresh dev who'd never had a full time programming job. They moved to Boulder after the program and six months later I followed.
Now I'm at Twitter, because I quit a job I hated and bet that my contacts would pay off.