Auren looks back into the early days of his exceptional career in starting and selling technology businesses in Northern California:

"Ten years ago this month, Scott Bonds and I started Kyber Systems. The reason: I had run out of money.

We were both engineers at UC Berkeley and we both had to pay our way through college. Having run a business in high school, I had the luxury of not having to work during my first few years in college (and only working during the summers). Instead, I was able to major in social life, student government, and beer. But as I was closing in on my senior year I realized that I was rapidly depleting my savings.

Around that same time, like everyone else around me, I started using Mosaic and then Netscape ... spending all my free time surfing the newish world wide web. Scott and I decided that we'd help political candidates create web pages ... of course, that was a really bad business model and it didn't last too long. Our first and only political client was San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan (who was running for re-election and lost to Willie Brown). The San Francisco Chronicle did write some very nice things about our web page and I met some terrific people on the campaign (including working closely with Mike Farrah who is now the political advisor to Gavin Newsom). "