Creating a web startup is a legitimate way of gaining assets but also one of the more risky ways of doing this. The point, which may not have been completely conveyed is that building assets is significantly easier & less risky than starting startups.

Go to school, learn something, work at interesting companies, take on responsibilities, be helpful to people, build up a network, have interesting conversations, be unique.

At some point, you'll have enough assets that a startup will just fall out of all of this diligent work.

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.