Lots of luck and some hard work. At the time (mid 90s) the job market was much better and everyone was hiring people to build ecommerce sites. It's harder in some ways now to get that entry level job. On the other hand it's phenomenally easier to start your own projects and get experience and attention. In the early 2000s I did a few open source projects which helped a lot. In 2007 or so I started writing articles on a regular basis, basically patching up holes in my education by taking on some subject and trying to explain it. If you lack one social signal ("he went to MIT") you can replace it with another ("he started the foobar project" or "he wrote that post about xyz").