Thanks for your response. I'm not in a position right now to start a startup however. My career in finance has not allowed me to build up a substantial nest egg (curse those student loans). A VC firm also sounds impossible to get into. I'm pretty low on the totem pole at work - not exactly gordon gekko here. I do think about those two questions quite a bit actually (nothing concrete yet).

My question was a bit broader than that. There's the possibility I could sharpen back up my development skills and go the route of trying to be a software engineer. My friends in development tell me I would be good at it. If that is indeed true, what are some good ways to show the world that?

Also, what other routes are there? Coder and VC - are those it? Or are there lesser known paths?