[justinludwig]

If you have some time you can afford to invest, help out on a popular open-source project (one that you're interested in, and that has lots of open issues which need curating/investigating/fixing). This will help you:

1. Build work experience for your resume 2. Develop expertise with the software that the project uses and produces 3. Generate ideas for your own startup 4. Meet and interact with prospective customers for your own startup, or prospective coworkers at other startups where you might like to work

Do that for 6 months or a year, and then try applying to startups which use that open source project (or start your own business solving a common problem that users run into with that project).