Naïve believers make the loudest heretics. That’s me. As a kid, I taught myself to code on a dusty old Commodore 64. By rights, I should have been a billionaire wunderkind before my sophomore year of college. But I screwed up. Instead of skipping class to build a world-changing website in a dorm room, I succumbed to the temptations of music, books, and girls. How shortsighted I was! How far astray I’d wandered! My earnings potential plummeted when I stopped writing software and started writing for newspapers. In the years to come, as my ill-chosen trade succumbed to digital disruption, I looked with envy at the techies, the winners, the pioneers. They had ideas. They had momentum. Most important, they had money. Why not me?