[michaelochurch]

This maybe just me - but most of the problems I've had when I started a company for the first time (and second, and ...) are with the business skills not the technical ones.

Fair point, but right now the business world (in VC-istan) is loopy and you might learn the wrong things-- things that are only true at the peak of a bubble.

I know someone who had a startup in the late '90s. He didn't know what he was doing and never should have been funded. He ended up raising about $50 million. Being CEO of a transiently important company went to his head, the tide went out, and he crashed and burned. It's 13 years later and he still hasn't emotionally recovered. All of his subsequent effort has failed because he wants his late-90s startup back. This sort of emotional pollution can be obvious or it can be subtle. I think most people get affected by some amount of it over their careers-- usually the more subtle kind. Loopy, style-over-substance business environments where clowns are made kings are ripe grounds to take in emotional pollution, and it's harder to resist that than people think.

Maybe starting a new business now, in the face of almost certain total and abject failure, is just what the doctor ordered

Right now, the issue isn't that there isn't money to be made in startups. There is. But the environment is congested and therefore noisy rather than meritocratic and that tends to teach people the wrong lessons.

In times of congestion, social connections win. What this means is that 90% of what is being funded is raising money because of who the founders know, not what their ideas are. If you try to imitiate their ideas, you're learning the wrong lessons. If you want to be a startup founder, you're better off figuring out what you need to do to have more VC connections in 5 years, and that may or may not be starting your own company.

As I said, learning the wrong thing is more dangerous than sitting a bubble out and doing something else, and emotional pollution is a cause of the former experience. The late-bubble danger isn't an "everyone loses" abject failure; it's that you might watch unqualified people win, while losing, and start (possibly subconsciously) picking up the attitudes and approaches of those winners, which might not suit you later when substance becomes king again.

[adrianhoward]

Maybe looking at what's VC funded is a mistake - but that seems an fairly small chunk of the startup community. Even in this effervescent time. Where most of the noise is, of course, but there are a stack of people bootstrapping products, or starting small dev or design agencies, or consulting. Lots of other ways to start and build businesses, and many lessons to learn outside of the VC funding bun-fight.

(I also question anybody who has a generic career goal of "startup founder" - they're probably heading for trouble anyway :-)