Yes, I am a US citizen. In a nutshell, I took all of my overtime and vacation in that year of working full-time and went to Guatemala to study Spanish and met a German girl ... that was September of 2001, so a pretty nutty time in the US, and it seemed like a good excuse to try something different.
I had a job with a startup lined up, which fell through, and then ended up getting hired by the SAP LinuxLab who sponsored my visa (roughly equivalent to a H1-B), so I went back to the US for a couple weeks, packed up my stuff, shipped it over and well, stayed. 6 years (and one job) later I got permanent residence, which meant I was no longer bound to having a company sponsor my visa, and a couple months later quit my job to found Directed Edge.
The convenient upshot of that is that now, at 28, I'm permitted to live and work anywhere in the US or EU.