Interesting post. The ultimate startup school is to really get your hands dirty by joining a startup. It gave a sense of what it'd be like if he's going to build his own startup, and a chance to decide if that's something he really wants.
Yeah, this article hit home. I've got funding/idea/biz plan and have been looking for some co-founders/employees, but everybody I have met thus far would be bricks (dead weight) in the equation.
I'm going to meet as many people as I can at startup school, but will probably need to go further than that. I've had a startup before, and learned alot from it, but I wasn't in the "startup community" at all. As far as working for a startup, many founders won't want you networking for your own stuff, they want you performing tasks for their function. So it has to be done either covertly, or in the open with the founders blessing.
Although working at a startup will give you the most experience I feel that people mainly go to startup school to hear success stories and be in the company of other entrepreneurs(as well as look for like-minded people to be involved in their project). I'd assume that the majority of the people probably already have a business in the works and are past looking for a co-founder. Correct me if I'm wrong as I've never attended the school myself.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. I went to the 2005 startup school and work at an existing startup.
Also, judging by the people I met at the startup school - few have an actual business with customers and such, except for YCombinator founders (in most cases, not even them ;-)). If they did, they'd probably be attending to the business instead. Many, however, had an idea for a business or a very-early-stage business (some product development, possibly a small prototype in front of potential customers).
I work with people who mostly do not have a startup mindset, or even a work-for-yourself mindset, and I think my creativity had been suffering until I took it upon myself to be proactive. In my experience so far, anything you can do to spend more time around entrepreneurial people will help. Just by going to a couple of Meetups and talking to people I've been very inspired and had better ideas.
