Thanks for the questions :) I graduated from BYU with a degree in Information Systems, which was more of an accounting degree with a little bit of databases, networks, and programming thrown in. I really liked the programming side, so as soon as I graduated I got a job writing code at a company in Utah called Omniture. They were a big web analytics company, later acquired by Adobe. I later moved to the SF bay area where I spent 6 years working in various startups like Path, Twitter, and Luxe. I also applied to Y Combinator and was part of the 2013 summer batch of companies, but our company ran out of money before we shipped. It was a huge learning experience for me, and very humbling.
When I started React Training, I was encouraged by the fact that we had money on day one. It wasn't like some of the other startups where I had worked that were still trying to figure out how to make money. So that was a huge confidence booster. It's hard enough to build the technical side of a startup without having to worry about the business model as well. If the business model is already in place, you can focus on the tech.