After college in Colorado (love to ski) I worked for 5 years, then got an MBA from Georgetown and joined a pre-IPO venture finance startup specializing in media, communications, publishing, and technology. We IPOed in 2001, I left in 2003, and get into structured finance -- not the kind you read about in the papers these days, but the kind the invests directly in electrical generation and transmission cooperatives.

After a couple years of that I decided to make a huge change: Quit my job, move to Europe, travel, photo (http://sweden06.com), blog, and teach myself some web technologies.

Now, finally, after too much pre-research, I'm starting to tech myself programming (Ruby) so I can build (or at least demo) web apps (in Rails). I know it's a long road and I'm an older guy, but I also believe it's pretty much never too late for anybody, whether he or she is someone with one set of skills deciding to teach themselves another set of skills or even someone severely overweight deciding to take the first step on the long, not easy, path that leads to lower weight and improved health.

Of course, starting down these paths and staying on them and making material progress are two different things, the second part being the most important, IMHO. It’s like the difference between ideas and execution: We all have lots of “great” ideas, many of us the same ideas, it’s the execution that separates.

Ok, sorry this comment got so long, this thread and the communities comments just got me switched on. Cheers from Sweden, Chris