Weinman has worked since she was 15, when she got her first job at a hot dog stand. For years she worked in retail, and at age 23 she opened a punk store on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. At 28, she closed the store and branched out into animation and special effects, working on films such as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and RoboCop 2 . And then in 1980, Weinman got his hands on his first computer. “I wasn't the first to walk through the door,” she says, “but pretty close in time to the beginning of where it all started. While it might be hard to employee email database imagine in today's era of ubiquitous online learning, back then there were no courses to take to learn more about computers. And the few books available on the subject have been written for technicians. "And I wasn't a technician," Weinman says. "I was just kind of passionate." So she started teaching herself in computer graphics. This sparked the start of a very lucrative new career that Weinman would continue to develop – learning to master new technologies and then teaching others – which culminated in the sale of his own online education platform for 1 .5 billion dollars. It may seem like a big step from his creative debut, but at the time, it felt like a natural transition. “For me, it was a fascinating new discipline that I found really interesting,” she says. "And I found a lot of connections between animation and the computer." Pretty soon, people started asking Weinman to teach them what she knew about computers. “I slowly realized that I really liked teaching,” she says. So she moved from animation and special effects to teaching computer graphics. From there, Weinman began teaching at universities, meeting a great demand for computer graphics courses. During this time, she started writing articles and came across the World Wide Web.