BEFORE THEY MADE IT BIG: Tech CEOs Tell Us About Their First And Strangest Jobs

No matter how successful you become, no matter where your career takes you, everyone starts somewhere. We asked six hugely successful tech CEOs to tell us about their humble beginnings.

We got some great stories, written by the CEOs themselves, about their first jobs and their oddest jobs.

These include tales of being held up at gunpoint, working at a nasty pollution control plant, measuring electricity output from manholes, and hauling people's belongings around for a moving company.

Read on ...

Bloomberg TV

Mark McLaughlin, Palo Alto Networks CEO: flying Cobra helicopters at age 22

McLaughlin leads Palo Alto Networks, an IPO darling of 2012, currently valued at $3.3 billion. He is the former CEO of Verisign, which sold to Symantec in 2010 for $1.2 billion.

What was the first job you ever had?

Many jobs. Mowed lawns starting at 12. Pumped gas at 15 (and got held up at gunpoint one night).

Worked 2 jobs at from 16 to 18. McDonald's after school during the week and bagged groceries at Acme on weekends. I grew up in Philadelphia, working class neighborhood, so this was not unusual.

What was the strangest, oddest job you ever had?

I started off my career flying Cobra helicopters because my first job was as an attack helicopter pilot for the US Army. I was 22 years old and was enlisted for two years, then heading off to law school.

Note: In his time in the US Army, Mark earned an Army Commendation Medal and Airborne Wings.

DataGravity

Paula Long, CEO, DataGravity: Pickin' tobacco

DataGravity is a storage startup still in stealth mode, that's raised $42 million of investment. Long previously co-founded EqualLogic, a storage company bought by Dell for $1.4 billion in 2008.

What was the first job you ever had?

Working on a shade tobacco farm in Connecticut (a tobacco grown under shade in the Connecticut River Valley, used primarily for binder and wrapper for
premium cigars.). I was 14 and I did it for two summers.

What was the strangest, oddest job you ever had?

[I worked on ] artificial intelligence and engineering robots. I learned [about] moving robot arms on an assembly line using gears, servo-motors and cables.

CA Technologies

CA Technologies CEO Mike Gregoire: A dirty job fighting pollution

CA Technologies is a 37-year-old enterprise software company with $4.6 billion in revenue. Prior to CA, Gregoire was CEO of Taleo and sold it to Oracle in 2012 for $1.9 billion.

What was the first job you ever had?

I delivered furniture for a furniture delivery service on Saturdays and sometimes after school. I was 15 and they went out of business after about a year.

What was the strangest, oddest job you ever had?

I was a general laborer at a pollution control plant. Lots of nasty stuff can happen at a place like that. It was a unionized shop and the other student that worked and I were only supposed to cut the grass and do outside work. But when there were really nasty things to clean, [we] students often got the privilege of a hard day's work.

I learned that I was not well suited to not having any control over my work product. I like things that are more creative and the day-in day-out. Where everything is the same sounds comforting, but just did not work for me.

Flicker/dberlind

Jayshree Ullal, Arista Networks CEO: working with manholes

Ullal is the "Marissa Mayer" of the enterprise network industry. Arista is a hot startup taking a bite out of Cisco and on track for a 2014 IPO with a $2.5 billion valuation. Prior to Arista, Ullal ran Cisco's bread-and-butter routing, switching business, leading it to $10B in annual revenue.

What was the first job you ever had?

Cashier at Woolworths, also duplicating keys, catching fish from the tank and making pizzas! I was 16 and I did for three years as a student.

What was the strangest, oddest job you ever had?

I was an electrical engineer intern at PG&E. My job was to measure and verify the power current and voltage ratings at every manhole to right size the electrical grid for the (then) new Moscone center in San Francisco.

The odd thing was, because it was unionized, I was escorted and driven from manhole to manhole every 100 yards in a PG&E truck!

Then I would go down the steep ladder into the dingy manhole with my hard hat and flash light encountering cobwebs along the way.

I learned that engineers are free spirited and not as structured as 9-5 employees governed by unions.

Charles Phillips, Infor CEO: Hauling refrigerators up stairs

Phillips runs Infor, an enterprise software company challenging SAP and Oracle with about $3 billion in revenue. Before that, he was the No. 2 guy to Larry Ellison at Oracle.

What was the first job you ever had?

My first job was at age 13 going door to door with my dad's lawn mower and cutting grass. My dad made me pay him back for the gas he bought for me to teach me about the cost of goods sold.

I finally figured out that most customers had their own lawn mowers with gas already paid for sitting inside of it.

So I would offer to use their lawn mower if they preferred which most did and that saved me the gas money and I didn't have the push the mower around town.

What was the strangest, oddest job you ever had?

Working for a moving company at 16 was my worst job. People tell you they have a few small things that could fit in half a truck and then you arrive and they have two refrigerators up two flights of stairs.

Or you'd drive 5 miles only to learn they changed their mind and want to move tomorrow or their roommate was claiming half their stuff and you can't figure out what to load until they work it out or not.

I learned to qualify prospective customers over the phone quickly and estimate how much stuff a family would have depending on how many kids, how many rooms, and where they lived. Early predictive analytics.

Then I got job at 17 to develop an application for printing debit memos for a retail branch of a bank. That was my first job in the computer industry.

But the most exciting and different job was of course the Marines. It was the first job I had where every single person had an insanely intense focus on doing their job well mainly because they didn't want to endanger their teammates.

That's where I learned that getting people to inspire each and peer reinforcement is actually more powerful than one general barking commands.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO: fixing an airline on 9/11

Whitehurst is running Linux software company Red Hat, which generated $1.3 billion in revenue last year on track to be $3 billion by 2016. Before Red Hat Whitehurst was COO of Delta Airlines.

What was the first job you ever had?

Within months of getting my driver's license, I got my first job as a part-time computer programmer for a stockbroker.

It is easy to forget that in the 1980s, computers and programming were not nearly as pervasive (or popular) as they are today. I had been interested in computers for a couple of years by then.

My prized possession was my Kaypro II with 64K RAM and dual floppies. I was tasked with building a computer program that would perform contact management, tracking interactions with potential and current clients. I wish I understood the value of such a system back then. Good thing Marc Benioff did. (Thank you, Salesforce.com.)

I still keep in touch with my first boss, Murray Solomon.

What was the strangest, oddest job you ever had?

While not necessarily the strangest or oddest job, one worth mentioning would be becoming "Acting Treasurer" of Delta at noon on 9/11, when I was still a partner at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The CEO of Delta at the time called me and said "we need you now". That was definitely jumping into the deep end. I knew very little about treasury.

I remember going over to the Treasurer's office - which was empty because it was an open position at the time - pulling the dust cover off the desk, sitting down and thinking "what have I gotten myself into"?

My key lesson out of doing that over the next couple of months - I officially joined Delta in January - was that it's OK to admit that you don't know things. I said "I have no idea" almost daily.

Too many people worry that saying "I don't know" is a weakness. It's not - pretending you know when you don't is the weakness.

(Here's the full story of how Whitehurst changed his career on 9/11)