Many of the things Daniel said resonated with me. Certainly, the online community around startups can have a low signal to noise ratio. But, there's a much bigger world outside Twitter, HN, and similar outlets.

I'm an attorney and most of my practice is IP and business litigation. But only a handful of my clients play to the broad consumer market. If you filter out the Mom-n-Pop shops and the VC-backed tech companies, there's a huge population of companies in the middle that started with Angel or F&F funding and have found really interesting business models entirely on their own.

There's a lot to learn from the mistakes of others, and the various startup "movements" can be a wonderful source of community. But at the end of the day, the founders I work with who have built successful enterprises generally have done it on their own.

At the end of the day, if you want to build a brick wall, you just have to start laying bricks.