
Who took a chance on you? - nikunjk
http://bijansabet.com/post/44870687156/who-took-a-chance-on-you
======
edw519
_Who took a chance on you?_

No one.

Perfect SAT scores. Great grades. Most creative in class. Most encouraged in
class. Rejected by every college but one.

After graduating college, rejected by every prospective employer except
Denny's.

Taught myself to program and gave it away until someone hired me.

Ten time employee who quit every company because someone got promoted over me
even though I did 3X the work.

Beat the pavement but couldn't find customers until I wrote the software
first, then they purchased.

When friends & family saw how much money I made, they all wanted in on it
until they saw the sacrifice I expected from them, then every one backed out.

Rejected by Alphalab because "no one would buy" what I had already sold many
times. Rejected by Ycombinator because they didn't think anyone would buy what
I had already sold many times. Rejected by Incubate Miami because they wanted
to see a business with a product and customers first. (Then why would I need
you guys? I thought the whole point of these programs was to find otherwise
unavailable opportunities by giving prospective founders a break from their
other responsibilities to be able to focus on just building.)

Rejected by prospective cofounders who didn't want to make the same sacrifices
I have made.

After being underestimated by the cool kids, teachers, girls, family members,
employers, and strangers for being an ugly skinny nerd my whole life, I
thought it would be different in the tech world, but it's not. It's still a
beauty contest based primarily of superficial subjective perceptions. People
are still often too lazy or unable to dig below the surface to find the
reality.

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not bitter. I'm glad...

I wouldn't be half the builder I am now if someone would have given me a break
along the way.

So I just keep on building and loving it.

~~~
Scriptor
I'm also curious what "Most creative in class" means. It seems odd to say
nobody ever gave you a break while simultaneously saying you were the "Most
encouraged". While not exactly the same, surely people recognized his
strengths then?

> Rejected by every college but one.

Which colleges did you apply to? Plenty of people with great grades and
perfect SAT scores still end up rejected from top-tier colleges.

> Taught myself to program and gave it away until someone hired me.

So someone decided to hire a young person with only self-taught programming
experience and (I'm assuming) no CS degree. Certainly sounds like someone gave
you a break here.

~~~
ruswick
I highly doubt that he had "perfect SAT scores." A 2400 with good grades is an
effective guarantee at most state flagships (and most mid-range private
schools for that matter.) He is either mischaracterizing his merits or didn't
apply to realistic school choices.

~~~
kosei
Most prestigious universities put a lot of weight on the essay and the
interview as well. If his interactions in these two areas came off as
cantankerous as he is coming off here, I'd understand letting in a guy with a
1580 over a guy with a 1600. (Based on the fact that he's had 10 jobs, I'm
sure he was graded on the 1600 point scale, not out of 2400)

And trust me, not every perfect SAT score is a guarantee of getting into
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, etc.

------
daeken
Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com, Lindows/Linspire, etc. I had been in
the press for the release of PyMusique (open source client for the iTunes
Music Store, which didn't apply DRM (it was done client-side, and in fact
still is)) and he saw one of the articles. He sent me the following email:

> Cody,

> I really admire what you're doing. I am the founder and former CEO of
> MP3.com. I'm not anti-DRM, but I am pro-consumer. I recently launched
> MP3tunes.com, a MP3 only store which also includes a locker so you can sync
> to many devices. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. You might
> also be interested in MP3beamer. See: <http://www.mp3beamer.com>

> Keep up the good work.

> \-- MR

I told him how much it meant to me to receive the email, and that the thing I
really needed to continue the work was an IDA Pro license; I had one a few
days later! Shortly thereafter, he contracted me to build hooks into iTunes to
display the MP3tunes store, and other functionality like that. Flew me out to
San Diego (my first time on a plane, from a tiny little farming town in the
middle of nowhere in PA), took me to the deviantArt summit, etc. I can't
overstate how important all this was to me.

He took a chance on me, and I ended up working my ass off for him for about
two years before starting my own company and moving on. I was 17 -- I could've
been a one-hit wonder, or I could've not fit with the team, or any number of
other things. While MR and I are not on good terms these days, I owe my
success in large part to him; for that I'll be forever grateful.

I hope I can pay the favor forward some day.

~~~
jonathanjaeger
Awesome! He's great at responding to emails if you have an actual
question/comment. While I don't agree with all of his politics, he has very
interesting opinions that he shares on Twitter and in interviews. In terms of
tech, he has great advice. His interviews on This Week in Startups and This
Week in Venture Capital are some of my favorite episodes of both podcasts.

------
oinksoft
When I was about to graduate high school, I knew one thing: I couldn't be an
adult and live with my folks (who are wonderful), or depend on them, period.
Just the way I'm wired, I guess. I knew HTML and CSS really well (this was
when A List Apart was _huge_ ), but that was about it. I had no right to a web
designer/frontend developer job, let alone a leading one.

But there I was in Fairfax at my first real interview just a handful of days
before graduation, nervous as hell. The business was document management and
tax preparation web applications. My portfolio consisted of a single website I
created to accompany my resume a week before this interview, with some made-up
content about Herndon, deployed to a free webhost. I talked a good game about
<table>-less CSS-driven layouts, accessibility, all the stuff his departing
designer had been pushing for (thanks again, ALA).

The guy thought I was sharp and took a chance on me. He offered a small salary
that seemed like a pot of gold to 18-year old me, and it was enough to be able
to get my own place, not even with roommates. I was ecstatic, and I'll never
forget the excitement of that summer.

In the rare event that you read Hacker News, thanks Arnold :^) ... Who knows
where I'd be today if you hadn't taken that risk.

~~~
kibwen
Similar story here. I spent a year out of college unemployed, listlessly
sending out job applications in an awful market and stewing in depression.
When I finally got a break it was at a company full of old-hand COBOL and RPG-
IV programmers... and they wanted to hire me to lead a huge web-based
modernization effort! Me, a scraggly-looking kid, decades younger than the
rest of the team, with no real evidence of my talents or experience. And
likewise the pay was a pittance compared to what the programmers in SV were
allegedly making. But the degree of freedom to do basically whatever I wanted,
however I wanted, more than made up for it. To this day they're delighted with
the work that I produce, and it's done absolute wonders for my self-
confidence. And even though I could strike out for greener pastures at this
point, the fact that they took such a chance on me is the reason that I stick
by them.

------
abstractbill
Honestly, very few individuals have ever taken a chance on me, but the British
government certainly did in a very life-changing way: I was lucky enough to go
to university when a full student grant would still pay for tuition and all
basic living expenses. I got a BSc and then a PhD, which was a _giant_ leg-up
(from a working-class background).

------
ruswick
This is a testament to how much weight luck holds in achieving a successful
career, and how one's life is largely governed by people's whims and general
arbitrariness.

(This is true not only due to people taking chances on others, but because
people are born into situations that govern their capacity for success.
Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates this wonderfully in Outliers, a book that has
had a large impact on me and which I recommend to everyone I can. But I
digress.)

It's actually somewhat disconcerting to consider.

~~~
sayemm
Well, then, like anything else, you maximize your chances of success and
having a few lucky breaks by: (a) having a long time horizon, developing
expertise, and sticking with it, (b) simply going up to bat more and taking
more and more chances (e.g. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"), and
(c) learning from failure/mistakes and rebounding from it.

At first glance, his post reads like he had one lucky break after another
after another, but I'm sure the road felt very shaky and uncertain along the
way, and he doesn't mention any of his mistakes/failures and I'm sure he made
several (it just wasn't the point of the post).

Max Levchin endured 3 failures early on, and then he had this chance encounter
with Peter Thiel before founding PayPal:
<http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1022>

~~~
simondlr
I'd like to add to this. One thing Jack Dorsey said (paraphrasing here) in his
interview with Kevin Rose (in Foundation series), is that he wishes he is
fortunate to realise an opportunity when it presents itself.

To me that means 2 things: seeking out and creating opportunities. Build
stuff, meet people, take risks and chances. This increases the chances of
opportunities (luck) happening: Meeting that perfect co-founder, stumbling
onto a brilliant idea, finding the right investors, etc.

Then secondly, you have to practice to be open-minded enough to realise that
when an opportunity actually arrives, you know it is one! You might seek and
create opportunities as much you want, as most of it ends up being luck, but
if you don't realise that luck, you've missed the boat.

------
nir
The CTO who hired me, a college dropout and former construction worker, to my
first startup. It was a menial data entry job but he took a chance when he let
me start coding 2 months later, and lead the web team to the launch a year
after that.

By then I had the chance to pay it forward by mentoring employees with design
and liberal arts background to become decent web devs. Coding for the web
isn't really that hard to learn if you're motivated, which is why it pains me
to see the bullshit "our hiring process" posts.

As a child in Israel, I'd hear about the American ideals of giving someone a
chance and taking a risk. Many years later, when I lived in NYC, I was
disappointed to find employers so risk averse they can barely make a decision
on hiring a junior PHP coder without an Ivy League degree, 4 references and a
6 hour interview process. I had enough experience for degrees not to matter,
but I feel for kids in the US who are now where I was when I started out.

------
thetabyte
The list is practically innumerable, but a particularly relevant pair: Trace
Wax and Obie Fernandez. They took on a 17 year old intern with no web
development experience outside of HTML/CSS, who could only work remotely, from
out of state, for about 8 hours a week, trained him in Ruby on Rails through
hours of pairing and paid for his trip to NYC to try working on site.

That experience has equipped me with what I've needed to land another
internship, start freelance consulting work, win a major hackathon, and get
accepted into a brilliant program. All because they took a chance on me.

I'm watching a brilliant, college age friend struggle through that initial
"getting started" process in web development, and all I can think is: Thanks
Trace, thanks Obie!

Edit: Also, thanks HN, for being the forum by which I found them! Though I'm
still not sure that was the correct use of an AskHN thread (and I'm afraid to
recommend the tactic to friends) it definitely helped me!

------
lbraasch
As a senior in high school, a pair NASA mech. engineers allowed me to shadow
them. I had no experience in the field, nor current acceptance into an
engineering program. They took me in and let me to work with flight hardware
(presently taking 3D images of the sun [1]). They had to jump through hoops to
get me in the door. The jobs were reserved for UC Berkeley students, and for
some reason, they picked me.

It was an amazing, life changing experience. I got through some of my hardest
engineering exams knowing I'd one day get to do something as cool as them. I
now build research instruments for physical oceanography. I'm not at all
surprised I stayed in a field of exploratory science.

[1]
[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo3D_press...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo3D_press.html)

------
starpilot
Someone on Craigslist paid me $50 to fix his CSS in the late 1990s. I was a
teenager in Virginia looking at CL for the first time (not knowing it only
served the Bay Area) when I saw the post in "gigs." I told him he could pay me
half the original amount since I didn't totally solve his second of two
problems, but he said, "I don't underpay my contractors," and the full amount
was in my PayPal shortly thereafter. As a teenager who'd never held a job I
was pretty stoked about getting paid for something fun. Later I'd be the only
non-CS major hired by my university as a summer student PHP programmer. I
never took the plunge to do programming full time, but I'm slowly working it
into my job as a mechanical engineer.

------
bearmf
Why is it that people are so grateful to their first employers? These guys did
nothing special, they just hired you. It is normal to hire inexperienced
people and train them. One should be reasonably grateful for that but
understand that employer also benefits from it (hi Captain Obvious). If a
person is reasonably smart he/she will be able to produce useful work after a
month of poking around. And being grateful for not being fired? Come on!

Be grateful to friends and lovers, not to governments and corporations.

~~~
thejacenxpress
I can understand this POV but I don't think it's the case every time. I feel
grateful all the time because I was the only person hired in the tech dept
that had no experience. Everyone else is either principle or has about 5-10
years experience. I've checked our job boards and the requirements involve
standards I was no where near at the time. Yes they want to train you, but
they want to train you because they believe in you as a person and what you
can do...yes for them...but also for yourself. My boss isn't a cold dude, he's
young, has tat sleeves, and was helped along the way by others...just like I
am...minus the tats.

~~~
bearmf
You are right that everyone's situation is different and it looks like your
boss really went an extra mile for you. Did you share some common background
with him, like went to the same school?

Keep in mind, though, that the situation when some (or all) current employees
would not be hired under current job requirements for outside hires is more
common than people think!

~~~
thejacenxpress
We did not, he actually give's me crap for my school (UT Austin) because he
went to USC (look up Rose Bowl 2006). We did share common backgrounds. He went
to school for creative writing and I went for Film. He was essentially given a
chance at being a programmer and I'm assuming I've rec'd that same treatment.

------
kosei
I'm thankful that a manager at Xbox took a big chance on me and helped me to
get my foot in the door in video games when I only had a college degree and a
boatload of passion. But I'm just as thankful that when I first moved to
Seattle, there were a few companies that _didn't_ take a chance on me, because
if they had, I never would have even applied for that job in video games - now
doing something that I never dreamed I'd be able to do: designing video games
for a living.

Just as important to getting the opportunities is taking advantage of them. If
Bijan had never agreed to take part in Spark, this may never have happened. So
kudos to him for taking the bull by its horns.

------
trafficlight
There were two different instances.

1\. In 1998, I was hired by the editor of the local newspaper to help maintain
their new website. I was 14 at the time and my resume consisted of a couple of
websites dedicated to Age of Empires.

2\. In beginnig 2000, at the age of 15, I was hired on by a small dialup ISP
for a tech support role. I was the first employee the founding group had
hired. At first it was just an after-school job, but it turned into a full-
time job a few years later. I can't even begin to describe how much I learned
there over the years.

------
fumar
It is great to hear people's success stories.

For a while I applied to jobs left and right. I have very little professional
experience(marketing). I hoped for similar story; someone willing to give me a
shot. It never happened. Instead, I changed my focus to growing my
girlfriend's dog treat business(startup). In the end, I gave myself a shot.

------
thejacenxpress
I feel truly grateful for three people who took chances on me. I worked first
in the film industry at Panavision with some of the top camera crews in the
world because my boss (1) at the time believed in me. After that I decided
software was a better future and a friend of mine (2) wanted me to work at the
company he worked for...a digital agency. With no resume or cover level I got
a job because my current boss (3) two years later believed in me. Now I'm here
on HN, have a youtube channel teaching others, and just wrapped up an eight
month enterprise website with a great team...and I'm going to buy a sports car
this weekend! How big hearts in some people can make such a big difference in
someone's life...forever grateful!

------
BESebastian
Up until a few years back, I was long term unemployed. 2-3 years or so, it was
pretty grating, but I tried to make the best of it, learning new skills,
practicing and playing a shitload of WoW. The latter part wasn't exactly
helpful, to be honest. I'd been through numerous government training and
employment schemes but coupled with my depression and my lacking recent
employment history, not many people were willing to take me on.

I had spent a lot of this time approaching local design agencies and web dev
studios (of which there are a lot in my area) for internships and the like,
rarely ever met with a response, let alone a "thank you, but no," so I kept
plodding away.

Eventually, someone responded to my enquiry, a small design agency with a few
fairly big clients, they offered me an unpaid internship working 3 or so days
a week to build up some experience. As much as I came to learn they were
exploiting me (I was there well over a year, eventually working for minimum
wage), I still do owe them a hell of a lot. Getting back into the swing of
things, doing something that I loved gave me my confidence back, I learned to
trust my skills and that I am good at what I do.

From that point on, literally every changed in my life. I came off the anti-
depressants, found a new girlfriend, got a new house and now have a new job
making decent money for a company I really enjoy. As much as I may bitch and
moan about how that agency took the piss so much with me, the chance that they
took on me turned my life around.

------
dpweb
Really great recruiter in NYC in 1997. Told me exactly what to say for the
interview and I got the job, with zero experience and a 2 yr gap after
college. Even got me $33k when I asked for $27k. Thought I was the luckiest
kid at the time!

------
muglug
Chris Phillips. He was the first person to see promise in me beyond my own
ambition, which was a big deal to a somewhat immature 18-year-old. He died in
a freak climbing accident before I could ever properly thank him.

------
tommaxwell
Someone took a chance on me recently... and I fucked it up. Long story short,
I was given the best job in the world and I decided to take it for granted so
I was fired. Taught me a lot about respect.

------
Mahn
Personally I'm thankful my first employers/managers didn't fire me for being
consistently late at work. Took me a while to figure out that being punctual
is actually perceived as a big deal.

~~~
bearmf
Which is completely arbitrary. Most software engineers do not need to be
present at the office at a set time.

~~~
Mahn
Sure, but not everyone realizes this. People can be rather conservative here
in Europe.

------
dirtyalpaca
I've always wanted to be a programmer. Ever since I was a kid when I spent a
bit of time in QBasic giving my friends unlimited lives in Snake and Gorillas.
By the time I was nearing adulthood I knew that I definitely wanted to pursue
programming as a career (by the standard-seeming path of getting a CS degree),
so I joined the National Guard so I could pay for it.

In 2008 I was working at Wal-Mart throwing boxes off of trucks and trucking
product out to the shelves. Incidentally this was the best job I had ever had
excluding my current career, and I still look back fondly on it.

I had tried to go to the local technical college for their programmer analyst
degree but quickly dropped out after I found that I knew most of the material
and could not even test out of classes that were primarily focused on teaching
you how to use a mouse.

In 2009 my unit was deployed to Iraq and I resigned that I would try to go to
a four-year college for CS when I returned and I had my VA benefits to throw
around.

Everything changed when I met my mentor (a figurehead in the Ruby community)
online via a comment that I had left on his blog. I had been learning
Ruby/Rails in my downtime during the deployment to that point and we continued
to converse throughout the rest of the deployment.

When I got back in 2010, instead of applying to college, I already a job offer
waiting for me because my mentor decided to take a chance on me and hire me at
the RoR consulting company he was CTO of at the time.

Three years later, I've spoken at a conference, co-authored a book, and have
been working in the career I always dreamed of because someone decided to take
a chance on me.

I owe the success of the last three years in large part to Chad Fowler and the
rest of the awesome folks I worked with at InfoEther in 2010, and I'll always
be eternally grateful for the chance I was given that led me to where I am
today.

------
smurph
The Computer Science program at my college.

At the school I went to, you had to apply to your program at the end of your
Sophomore year, and in order to continue, they had to accept you. The advisers
basically told us up front that you had to have this GPA overall and this GPA
in classes in that program and it helps if you get good grades in classes X, Y
and Z since they are the weed outs. I didn't meet either GPA requirement, and
I only had good grades in classes X and Z, with an average grade in class Y. I
was also pretty shy and antisocial in the academic setting, so I didn't have
any professor friends to go to bat for me. I got the acceptance letter anyway,
and my plans for a back up degree in finance didn't have to come into play.
I've always been thankful that they took a chance on the under performing dude
they didn't know and let me develop my passion.

------
habosa
I'm still in college so I don't have a ton to look back on, but I am very
grateful that hackNY took a chance on me last summer. I certainly wasn't as
qualified as many of the fellows and the program changed the direction I plan
to take my life over the next few years. I was a Bioengineering Major dabbling
in programming and now I'm goingfull-steam-ahead with CS and couldn't be more
excited for where programming will take me over the next few years. I now know
someone at dozens of cool companies and I got a chance to meet some industry
legends, all because whoever read my application thought an Android app or two
was enough experience to write production code for pay at an incredible
startup (SecondMarket). Best summer of my life and only good things ahead,
thanks hackNY.

------
mchaver
I am thankful for my last boss. I had just got my Masters degree in Computer
Science, but because I was so busy I never really had time to put together a
portfolio. He found me on Reddit and asked if I could code in Python. I said
yes, he hired me right away without asking any other questions and said if he
was satisfied after two weeks I could stay. I was quite nervous at first but I
was never fired, and I learned a lot working for them. Unfortunately 8 months
later they ran out of funding, but I will always remember the benefit of the
doubt that he gave me. Now I need to find someone else to take a chance on me!

------
c_t_montgomery
Tony Stubblebine, co-founder and CEO of Lift. Can't thank him enough.

<https://medium.com/unforgettable-moments/36369a6063d1>

------
INTPenis
I dropped out of school but my brother got me to move out of my hometown and
start working for a small web host where the boss took a chance on me.

Turns out I was so hard working, so dedicated, that years later when I was
stuck in a callcenter because I didn't have any grades from school, that same
boss recommended me to a big consulting firm, who took a chance on me. And it
payed off, for both of us. Now I have a career in IT and I never graduated
what Americans would equal to High school. :)

------
jmathai
My parents[1], The Shuttleworth Foundation[2] and my parents[3].

[1] <http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/5bk/tags-mathew,mary>

[2] <http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai/>

[3] <http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/38f/tags-mathew,mary>

------
deusebio
A local creative director in town gave me my first break. I was slated to work
as a designer at coupon company making classified ads until he decided to give
me a chance and hire me at his company. I think my career would've taken a
much different path if he didn't give me that chance.

Granted, he was in a different type of design discipline. Learning
fundamentals and how to think was more valuable to me at that time than just
learning software.

------
ritchiea
Interesting thread. I hope I can be nearly this lucky in the future. Can't
tell you how many times in NYC I've been flat out told "we don't take chances
on people." I understand and I certainly don't feel like my life has been
stymied by lack of opportunity. But I'm definitely still looking for the first
one that really clicks.

------
pjungwir
Mine is not a hiring story (though that's another story, since I was hired
with just an English major), but a few months into my first job I asked my
boss which of two different architectural approaches he thought I should take
on a project, and he said, "I trust you." That really meant a lot to me.

------
kefka
Noone has "taken a chance on me". I've had plenty of interviews, applications,
resumes: you name it. Even went through the unemployment interview and resume
courses. No real reason why. I can't even get a helpdesk position.

I've went back to school. I hope something pans out soon.

~~~
precisioncoder
I had the same thing happen in the city I was in, no one was hiring
programmers straight out of school, I got two phone interviews and that was
it. Ended up losing a bet with my wife (That I could find a job in 3 months)
and moving to Austria. Learned enough German to get a job (took about 5
months) and then found out they were desperate for software people here. I got
two job offers in my first week of applying, I accepted one and have been with
my firm for a year and a half now.

~~~
bromang
Out of interest, what is the attitude in Austria (and Germany) towards hiring
programmers without degrees?

~~~
precisioncoder
My colleague doesn't have a degree, the programmer I replaced also didn't have
a degree. On the other side Austrian and German people see degrees as a rank
and social status which means you will be generally respected more if you have
a degree. Your starting salary will usually be higher as well if you have a
degree.

------
rsingla
Brian, who took a young student with no experience and took the chance for me
to be a co-op. Securing that position revamped my entire view of what I do and
has already opened doors.

------
TomGullen
My brother, was at a bad stage of my life and he invited me to co-found with
him. Risky on his part, two years on though and we're miles ahead of where we
dreamed we could be!

------
beachstartup
pretty much everyone who hired me before i turned about 27.

------
neoveller
Sendhub took a chance on me when I was just half a year into programming and
one hackathon API prize in. I've been set ever since.

------
mkopinsky
I am getting a 404. Why would someone pull down a page which is on the front
page of HN?

------
rokhayakebe
Life. I am here. Sentient, mobile, and mentally able. That's all I need.

------
marbleint
Why would I expect someone to take a chance on me?

------
Edmond
No Mom/Dad ?

------
hydralist
Paul Graham in my 2013 summer application /future

