I have been working on the web since 1998, which is a really long time in web years. Back then, Google was just a couple of grad students working in a garage!
I have a degree in Visual Communication Design, and early in my career I worked primarily as an interface designer. Over time I became increasingly interested in how my work, and that of the entire development team, impacted the real people who used what we built. I discovered that, all too often, end user concerns were completely absent from the design process.
Since 2002 I have focused on user experience issues, including interaction design, usability, information architecture, and user research. In that time I have helped clients big and small to develop websites and online applications that seriously consider the user perspective. But I have never worked from my garage. Is that why no one has given me a billion dollars?