>I got a job at O'Reilly as a marketing coordinator for their software group as a way to get me to California. I was 25. I had no degree or significant tangible skills. (I could "code" HTML, ColdFusion, VB...and write marketing copy.) I had spent the last few years trying to get my own Internet company going in Nebraska, which was a painful (but educational) mess.

Maybe the problem was not so much Nebraska but the fact that he had no significant or tangible skills - in 1994-1997, when it would have probably been more difficult for a guy in the middle of nowhere to pick up the necessary skills by himself.