I lived in a small town in northern Canada until I was 17. I had had an interest in programming since I was 11, but the job most relevant to "computers" you could get up there was repairing them at BestBuy. My parents weren't particularly rich, and didn't encourage me to strive for high academics or anything of the sort; in fact, the only thing they really wanted me to do was to get a driver's license, so I could have a fallback job as a truck driver. I hadn't a single role-model for the "white-collar dream" I found myself pulled into from playing with Linux and reading Slashdot. I just knew I couldn't manage it living where I did.
At 17, I finished high-school and, with virtually no separation, moved to a more reasonably-large city (Vancouver) and began taking courses at a community college. I believed, at the time, that taking my first two years at a "cheaper" school would be good for my future student-loan-debt load, and optimized for this instead of, say, networking opportunities. The community college was full of unmotivated students just trying to squeak by, teachers who knew less about CS than I had learned from the Internet, and in the end, I didn't feel motivated enough† to make the grades to manage a transfer into the CS program of the "state" university (UBC.) My student loans cut off, and I dropped out.
I started attempting to do software-dev contracting. (It's very hard to get full-time employment as a developer without a Bachelor's, whether or not you're an autodidact with 8+ years' experience in some technologies.) I moved from one gig to another, never really finding that fabled "word of mouth" that would let me lever one contracting job into another. I always worked alone, and remotely; I was never hired onto a team. I looked on eLance a lot.
I still haven't made, in all this time (I'm 23 now), a single "programmer friend" who would qualify as a connection, nor met a programmer in person from whom I've learned a single fact, rule, or concept I wasn't already familiar with, or been introduced to any neat new technology. This isn't bragging about my talents--rather, just painting a picture of the bottom-of-the-barrel places I've been hanging out. I'm sure I would feel out-of-my-depth (in the best way) sitting in any arbitrary coffee shop in Silicon Valley‡, or in any even-somewhat-modern startup here or elsewhere.
If you want to talk about lacking connections, first imagine the closest thing to a "programmer" in your Facebook friends list being your friend from high-school who does accounting at an oil-and-gas firm. Imagine everyone in your family saying that the one time you got paid $50k was "a fluke and won't happen again; you should just work at a gas station like your mom and your aunt do" (leaving alone the fact that you don't have enough customer-service experience to be considered for that job in a competitive market.) Imagine having no major portfolio pieces you can show off, despite years of coding, because you've alternated between struggling to survive on a total dry-up of income with no savings (no time for side-projects), and doing programming jobs for capricious clients who take your backend system and give up on the idea before hiring a front-end guy, relegating your efforts to only be examinable through API calls and doodles of wireframes. (And while you're at it, imagine having a few friends in the US, who have perfectly good job opportunities available for you with their companies, but who can't help you out until you go back and finish school--which you can't, at least yet, afford to do.)
But there is that app I made two years ago that I still have in closed beta, the browser-based-collaboration-environment one with an active community even when I don't check in on it for weeks at a time. No time to remodel it into something good enough to launch to the public... but it lets me call myself a startup founder nevertheless. I'm just in stealth-mode, that's it. Heh.
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† Having undiagnosed ADHD may have had something to do with that as well. I imagine, having detected and compensated for that flaw, I would be quite better at slogging through that remedial-feeling workload if I had to do the same now.
‡ I'd love to move there, actually... if I had American citizenship. Or an undergraduate degree to legally qualify me for an H1B or TN work visa. Blocked on all fronts, there.