Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup?

At work, adopted a policy to always try to own more things and make things easier for others (particularly those above me) without becoming a silo for information. Write everything down, make it accessible, and give people status updates (which include any accomplishments) before they ever need to ask for them. Then, just get to work, and own things as much as possible. Because of this, I was able to show ownership above my given position for every single job, which really helped when the next opportunity came along. Additionally, always be learning / focused on continuous improvement. If you can constantly be thinking about ways to chart a path forward and suggesting those things when they make sense, you work to make everyone's life easier.

You also have to know your market and not be afraid to leave whenever the writing is on the wall or when you feel your ownership is limited. Leaving for those reasons rarely leads to hard feelings; if you leave because you want better ownership in helping your company but aren't granted it, and have a track record of success, usually people don't want to see you go and you'll leave on good terms.

With this outlook, I went from a college grad in 2009 making 45k/year, and 6 years later I'm about to lead a team at 185k/year with a 40 hour work week (and paid overtime, somehow). Which reminds me: also, be grateful -- we work in an industry that gives us a ton of opportunity.

Ownership, proactive communication, continuous improvement, and knowing your market/value.

I simply found ME to be too slow on multiple dimensions.

After uni I joined IBM as a graduate. I kept freelancing in my spare time and helped my brother build a successful e-commerce company over the past 11 years.

In 2012 I left full time employment and continued freelancing to two regular clients.

In 2013 I built an MVP to be notified of changes on a web page, and while at an E-commerce trade show, I asked the CEO of a company exhibiting the question about how they get client e-commerce products into their system without any technical integration.

This resulting in me creating a second MVP to scrape e-commerce data for retailers wanting to sell on marketplaces. The CEO spent the following 6 months convincing me to be their CTO, which I've been doing for the past 2.5 years now.

So yeah, my future changed very drastically based on me deciding to wait a few more minutes to see if the CEO was free to have a chat. I could easily have walked away instead. Still looking forward to that feeling of 'success' but I know I've moved a long way over the years. I've learnt that if you focus on building up a network of contacts and actually getting to know them, you give yourself many more opportunities than you would otherwise have.

However, except with my getting into IBM, my university education hasn't played a significant role. Owning my own company, doing real work and continually learning and building has been critical.