To compensate, he bought a dark suit, a white button-up dress shirt, and a tie. The clerk at Macy’s tied it for him. He even bought a pair of dress shoes, which felt weird to him after a life spent in steel-toed boots. Shaved, showered, shampooed, and dressed in the crisp suit, he thought he looked like a roughneck dressed up for prom. He was still nervous.

He was also worried about his programming skills. He had been playing with all sorts of scripting languages on his free GeoCities page and a few other web hosts, but he wasn’t completely sure what languages the startups would use.

His concerns about his appearance vanished at the first interview. They barely looked at him. Everyone was wearing T-shirts and Teva sandals.

In a cramped conference room, the company’s CTO, Neil Ellison, slapped down a few sheets of paper with a programming problem on it. It was in PERL, a language he knew.

“If you don’t know PERL, you can leave now.”

Desmond picked up the pencil and began scribbling.

“Find me when you’re done.”

Desmond didn’t look up. Fifteen minutes later, he approached Ellison.

“Problem?”

“I’m finished.”

The man glanced at the page, started to discard it, then saw something that made him study it closer.

Another programmer peeked over his shoulder. “It’s wrong,” he said dismissively.

“No,” Ellison said. “It’s a better solution than ours.”

Ellison looked up.

“What did you say your name was?”

The next two interviews proceeded in a similar manner. Only the programming languages changed. Desmond solved problems in PHP, Javascript, and Python. At the end of the day, he had three job offers in writing. His first choice was an offer from a promising startup called xTV, but he needed help: he didn’t understand half of what was in the contract.

He asked around about a good lawyer, and later that day, he was sitting in the office of Wallace Sinclair, Attorney at Law. The office was nice, which made Desmond worry about the man’s rates.

The biggest disappointment with all the job offers was that he wouldn’t automatically get stock in the company when he signed on. Instead, the companies had something called a vesting schedule: he would get the stock over time, as he stayed with the startup. And it wasn’t even stock outright; he was granted options, which were contracts to purchase the stock at a set price.

“How does that do me any good?” Desmond asked.

“If the stock goes up, it does you a great deal of good,” Wallace said. “Think about it. If you have an option to purchase the stock at one dollar and the stock is trading for fifteen dollars, your option is worth fourteen dollars per share.”

Desmond understood that.