I’ve been working and living in Silicon Valley since 2002. At age 21, I joined Oracle as a software engineer. When I met Larry Ellison atop one of the now dormant Oracle towers, he was actually quite friendly, at least to me and some fellow interns.

At 24, I joined a wiki startup called JotSpot, in large part to work with its founders, who had previously created the once-popular Excite search engine. I had an absolute blast working with the...