I had lots of this when I was starting my career. As far as I could tell, it was some combination of being seen as very sharp, energetic, quirky, and most of all enthusiastic in a vision and enjoying every minute working toward it. After getting back from some OS/2 developer course at Redmond, I accidentally got a mainframe COBOL ERP software company to turning a pet side project into effectively a Visual Basic for OS/2. It did have a COBOL generator back-end though so they could sell to existing customers. The company's profits declined as it alienated existing customers that were paying large support contracts.