Long before he was running a multibillion-dollar company and joining the ranks of the ultrawealthy, Marc Rowan held a series of hospitality and retail jobs before becoming cofounder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, the $79 billion investment giant.

“I’ve had a lot of different jobs,” Rowan recently told iCapital CEO Lawrence Calcano during a podcast. “I was a valet parker at the Diplomat Hotel—now, the Shell Bay Golf Club. I would drive cars between New York and Florida for snowbirds, transporting their cars for the winter.”

Rowan grew up moving between Florida and New York and attended high school in Hollywood, a coastal city in Florida. In addition to driving cars up and down the East Coast, he also worked at a party goods store and for “the best kosher caterer” in South Florida.

When he graduated from high school in 1980, the federal minimum wage was $3.10 per hour, a rate commonly associated with service-sector work at the time. Rowan said those early jobs stayed with him throughout his more than four-decade career in finance, and he now has an estimated fortune of $11.1 billion.

“Every one of those jobs, you have to take something away from,” the Apollo CEO said.

Fortune reached out to Apollo for comment.

Rowan’s path into finance

After those early jobs, Rowan moved into finance.

Although he came from a family of lawyers, he decided not to pursue law after seeing what he described as the “terrible” coursework in his pre-law program. He then called the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and asked whether he could still enroll. Rowan attended the Ivy League school, where, he said, everything “just made sense.”

“When I started getting a little bit of education, I worked at Booz Allen for a summer in financial consulting,” Rowan said in the podcast. “I worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange—it was then the Blue Room—as a runner.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree and MBA, Rowan’s “first real job” was at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the Wall Street investment bank. He joined the mergers and acquisitions department at the end of 1984. A few years later, Drexel collapsed in 1990 after the junk bond crisis.

In the aftermath, Rowan and two former Drexel colleagues, Leon Black and Josh Harris, founded Apollo the same year they lost their jobs.

Over the following decades, Apollo grew into one of the world’s largest alternative asset management firms, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis. Rowan became CEO in 2021, and the firm’s assets had risen to more than $1 trillion earlier this year. The 62-year-old has also served as chair of the board of advisors of the Wharton School of Business and helped fund the launch of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan research initiative that analyzes the fiscal impact of public policy.

Other executives who started with ordinary jobs

The path to the top of corporate America is not always defined by family connections or elite credentials. Some of the world’s best-known executives once worked hourly jobs before taking on corner offices.

Marvin Ellison, the chief executive of Lowe’s, which has a market value of $122 billion, started by making $4.35 an hour at Target while studying at the University of Memphis. He is now president, CEO, and chairman of the home-improvement company, and one of only 11 Black Fortune 500 leaders. Ellison has said he built his career by taking on assignments that “nobody else wanted.”

“I didn’t have great pedigree, I didn’t have an Ivy League education. I didn’t have any stellar international opportunities or stints on my résumé,” Ellison said in a 2022 interview. “I’m competing against all of these exceptionally talented people on paper; I had to find a way to differentiate myself.”

Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi also worked while attending Yale University. To help pay for her degree, she took night shifts as a dormitory receptionist from midnight to 5 a.m. Nooyi has said the experience helped shape how others viewed her determination and work ethic.

“When we got consulting jobs or investment banking jobs, people looked at us and said, ‘Hey, these are brainiacs,’” Nooyi said in an interview with former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this year. “Respect just went up—purely because of the hard work and all the efforts we put in…People realized that this was a grueling experience for us, and they respected us for that.”

Even Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, one of the world’s most valuable companies, worked ordinary jobs before leading the $4.49 trillion technology giant. As a child in Robertsdale, Alabama, Cook delivered newspapers. By age 14, he says he had “graduated to flipping burgers” at a local restaurant and also served ice cream at Tastee Freeze.

Cook recalled that classmates would stop by to tease him while he wore a small hat and apron and earned $1.10 an hour. While earning his MBA at Duke University, he worked during the day and attended school at night to pay tuition.

“My upbringing was centered on work and the belief that hard work was essential for everybody, regardless of your age,” Cook said on the Table Manners podcast last year.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com