Chemical Brothers, 1999. I was a junior in college, and @brockrumer, Paul Walters and I drove up to Chicago for a pitch meeting with Motorola where I fell in love from across the room with an intern that I would never see again. We were famished afterwards, and had a late lunch at an upscale Italian restaurant called Club Lucky, where we wolfed down phenomenal food and received the best service I'd ever experienced. I was aspiring to be a DJ at the time, and Paul, who was a somewhat successful one, took us to a record store afterward where I scored some hard-to-find vinyl for my collection.

When we got to the show, Paul snuck me a few overpriced domestic beers despite my age. Fatboy Slim opened and was a bit of a disappointment, but the Chemical Brothers blew me away. I found myself covered with sweat on the dance floor as the melody of The Sunshine Underground consumed me, dancing along with the rays of colored lights. I slept well that night, even though I drew the short straw and had to sleep on the floor of our cheap hotel room.

Experience

The cruel treatment of animals in factory farms is one of the primary reasons why I haven't eaten meat in 15 years.

Sure. Is it OK if I give you random answers?

Helen Mirren is doing something right.

Great question- there were so many early in my career, I can't choose just one. And I'm sure I'll leave a few out, but....

Troy Menchhofer was one of the principals at a company that built/installed shelving systems at hospitals, libraries, etc. I got a job there as a freshman in high school and would work weekends and summers doing manual labor work- mostly moving files and setting up shelving. When I was a sophomore or junior he wanted to start using computers to do space planning instead of drawing it out on paper. So he got me some simple CAD software and made me get an AOL account. He'd email me his sketches, I'd recreate on the computer, and send him back the CAD file. This was the first taste I got of what it'd be like to make money off of work I did on a computer, and working at the direction of a client. Troy also promoted me to team lead when working on the manual labor stuff on the weekends, and I had to accept the responsibilities that brought pretty quickly.

Rick Shadiow was the first person to ever pay me for a software program I wrote. Mr. Shadiow taught a Pascal class my senior year in high school, and was also the coach of the baseball team. He had me write a baseball bingo program and paid me $50 for it. I remember having a ton of fun writing the app, and would've done it for free, but as a poor high school student $50 was just incredible. I think that was the first time it clicked for me that I could make money doing something that was fun, and specifically from writing software.

Cindy Smith gave me a job as a freshman in college in the IT department fixing/building PCs. I somehow managed to land that job despite literally never having touched the inside of a computer before. (I had saved enough to buy a $300 PC in high school but that was a ton of money to me, and a crucial tool for me to be able to make more money. I was so terrified of something happening to that PC that the thought of tinkering with the hardware was unfathomable.)

Brock Rumer (@brockrumer) gave me a job midway through my freshman year in college doing web-based development. I'd never done it before, but he told me I'd have the job if I learned Perl by the time we got back from winter break. I snagged a free copy of Perl 5 by Example and well, the rest is history.

Of course, my career has taken a lot of twists and turns in the 15 years since then, and people have taken big chances on me at each stage. In the current chapter, it's been Steve Anderson (@standers) and Geoff Yang (@geoffyang).