I went from having zero employable skills to becoming a full-time software engineer employed at a fast-growing YC startup.

After quitting poker prior to Black Friday, I founded a startup and self-financed it. After some bad spending, questionable decision making, and Black Friday locking up my reserve cash, I failed. Shortly thereafter I made two realizations:

1. While I loved being my own boss, and had been for years while playing poker, I was awful at the non-technical side of startups, despite genuinely loving the tech industry and having a lot of passion for what I did.

2. I learned a lot during my time as a non-technical startup founder, but I was lacking a concrete skill and figured it'd be very difficult to get a job selling my vague abilities related to poker and entrepreneurship. I decided that what I truly liked doing was building things, even if they were shoddy HTML websites, and decided to learn how to code.

The major skills that I think helped in my transition include: learning/adapting quickly, being able to "grind" many self-motivated hours, respect for meritocracy, and in general, always thinking of ways to improve oneself.

The online climate for professional poker was incredibly competitive, and there was relentless pressure to always stay ahead of the competition, comprised of young guys just like me whose livelihoods depended on this game. This instilled a sense of urgency in which I understood the penalty of taking days off or mindlessly playing through a session, or even a single hand. There was a hunger, and I absolutely had to know everything about my craft otherwise someone else would beat me to it.

At the end of the day, when you play poker you simply have a set of tools: Your knowledge, the poker site, your accessory software, the hands you're dealt. Your goal is to play the hands the best you can - by adhering to core statistics and game theory principles, perhaps utilizing some out of the box thinking, and so forth, to yield a mathematically efficient, long-term/scalable result.

At AnyPerk, I have my set of tools, which I leverage to develop the most efficient, readable software solutions to day-to-day problems. The difference now is that the world of software development isn't a cutthroat, zero-sum game. I also no longer suffer from mental breakdowns every other month, which is lovely added bonus. I knew poker was always a means to an end, and I'm really happy with where I've ended up.