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Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.

Originally, I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1,000 computers.

I'd always loved technology. It's something I always messed around with in computer labs at school. So I glommed onto it very early as way to differentiate myself in business.

When I was a young man in the 1970s, tech firms were scattered across the developed world. Since then, America has come to dominate tech almost totally.

Before I started Code for America, I spent my career around startups. First it was game developers, small teams trying to make hits in a tough business. Then, when I started working on the Web 2.0 events, it was web startups during times of enormous opportunity and investment.

My family were all entrepreneurs, including my parents and grandparents.

As a child, I did what any normal kid who grew up without any electricity would do - I spent countless hours working on a computer wired to my parents' car battery... and learned how to code. This natural passion for computers lead me into the Internet market during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Right now, we have the most complex relationship with technology that we've ever had. Your regular person has more technology in their life now than the whole world had 100 years ago.