The unglamorous first jobs of the top players in tech

The biggest names in tech didn't start out at the top - they had to work their way up.

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer was a grocery store clerk. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once sold vacuum cleaners.

Homebrew Ventures cofounder and partner Hunter Walk posed a question to his Twitter followers on Labor Day: What was your first job? A bunch of founders, CEOs, and other VCs chimed in.

For every Mark Zuckerberg founding a company in his dorm room, there are plenty of founders who got their starts at less glamorous jobs - scrubbing toilets, pumping gas, and shoveling snow, just to name a few.