I can certainly see the value of building up a following and leveraging that towards your startup. (plenty guilty of that myself)
It seems like all the extra time you would spend by going above and beyond to get a following/skills could be spent (with the same risk) doing a really cool startup on the side.
"a following" is just one type of asset. Ben Newhouse, who I didn't mention in my post leveraged his asset of building Yelp Monocle (as an intern!) into Bubbli (http://bubbli.co/intro/). It's undoubtably true that Bubbli could not have been built though, without leveraging Ben's asset. A different startup could have been built that might look vaguely similar from the outside but it wouldn't have been Bubbli.
Arriving in late via a google search, but yes, definitely. Name dropping Monocle accounts for instant credibility with nearly anyone - which is awesome, but at the same time kind of weird, because I'm the same person I was before I backed into doing Monocle.
Well said. I have found this to be true in my own life. My entire business education in college was a rehash of things I had already learned working on a pre-college startup.
Time is one thing in life you can't get back. From that perspective choosing to go the 'safe' route is as much a risk as taking a risk itself.
It seems like all the extra time you would spend by going above and beyond to get a following/skills could be spent (with the same risk) doing a really cool startup on the side.