I feel like startups value credentials less than experience. I would probably just jump into a startup now so that you can continue to learn while getting real life experience and building that network.
Agreed, although I find a big disconnect between what I'm genuinely interested in and the start-up scene here in London/Europe and turned down a few startup offers ultimately for that reason. May be naive but with a visa but there is generally much more exciting opportunity (purely around startups) in US and SV in general - and the visa is what I'm missing and grad school would deliver.
Oh, ok. Have you reached out to any US-based startups that you are interested in? Perhaps you can convince them they need a remote European team to help them expand or give them more off-hours support from a different time zone.