(FORTUNE Magazine) – TONY ESPINOZA, age 28 Espinoza and two colleagues founded When.com, a Web calendar company. They sold the outfit to America Online in 1999 for a reported $200 million.

I grew up in Dallas in I guess what you would call a very underprivileged situation. No one in my family had ever gone to college. At a very early age, I decided I couldn't live in poverty all my life. I learned to program and ended up going to Stanford to study computer science.

I liked programming and I knew I could make a great career out of computers, so I didn't think I had the option not to go down that path. But I hated my studies so much that I dropped out of Stanford in 1991. The rationalization was, well, if I really want to go into this computer stuff, I'm going to do it first to make sure I like it. I wasn't going to waste a Stanford degree on a subject I didn't absolutely love.

Over the next few years, I worked at IBM, Apple, and a few other places. It was 1995 before I finally cut out on my own. It's funny: When I left my job, my boss gave me a card that he had made. The front of it said, "May your startup be the next Netscape." Little did I know that AOL would eventually buy Netscape, then buy my company and merge us into Netscape. I keep that card on my mantel at home.

After the company was sold last year, you know, I was working for AOL, and it was like, you've made more money than you ever dreamed you'd have. You can do anything you want. So I decided to quit. Because music is a passion of mine, I bought a recording studio. I have a partner who's been working in the recording business for 22 years. We do sound for cartoons and also some TV shows and movies. We shot a documentary this summer. I'm working with a lot of creative people who aren't just focused on improving profit margins and stuff like that. Which is very compelling to me.

Not having the excuse of needing money to pay the rent has turned out to be a tremendous responsibility. Work can be a huge source of self-esteem and place and purpose and all that stuff. So once working isn't necessary anymore, you can crumble under the weird confusion that creates.

I definitely went through a huge range of feelings, but in the end, having money just made me feel like, well, I have to deal with what matters to me, I can't hide from it. If I have a creative impulse that I've been toying with for years, I've really got to jump in there and do something with it now. I don't want to be 20 or 30 years older and not have learned to play the piano as well as I want to--that sort of thing.