Current position: Co-founder and director of Electronic Content Management, Serials Solutions. I started the company with two brothers and a high-school friend to solve a need we identified in libraries. We are now part of ProQuest, a publicly traded company in Ann Arbor, Mich., and have nearly 80 people in our Fremont offices.

First job: Gofer for Real Comet Press, as a high-school student in 1986. I started the summer helping the Press move out of the publisher's house on Capitol Hill to real office space on Pike Street, which was shared with Seal Press. I ended the summer moving the Press from Pike to Western, when Metro took over the building on Pike while constructing the bus tunnel.

Pay: About $1,200 for the summer. It must have been just a few dollars an hour.

How I got the job: A friend of the publisher lived across the street, and I think she put in a good word for me, because they contacted me. We had an interview and the publisher said she was also interviewing others, but I think that was so she'd have an out if it turned out I was a flake.

What I learned: Everything you do is a reflection of you. I had to hand-write addresses for a number of the catalogs we sent, and I figured the penmanship wasn't that critical since the recipient would see it, but not my boss. What I forgot was that some of those catalogs would be sent back by the post office, and everyone in the office would then see my work. I also learned about being open to new technology; a computer there was the first I had seen with a hard drive, rather than two disk drives, and I spent an afternoon constantly switching between one disk I thought had the program on it, and another with a file on it, when in fact the program was stored on the newfangled hard drive