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Comment by travisglines | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that leveraging intangible assets can be extremely powerful in creating success for web startups, very few people have such an asset to leverage. Those that do are probably looking to enjoy life a little bit more and may turn into angel investors or are looking to get out of the bipolar startup lifestyle.

How does one build an asset like this? By creating a web startup from scratch.

So yes if you happen to be one of the lucky few that have a nice asset like that, do the obvious thing you would have done anyways and leverage it. Otherwise join the rest of the crowd building one of the assets from the ground up with solid execution and a decent idea.

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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.

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