I think that you have to be careful about the start-up dream stories. They are like chocolate cake. Eating it makes you feel good, and you want to eat a lot of it, but it is not good for your long-term health or happiness. Time spent reading a start-up book or story is time you will never get back.
If you are serious about starting a start-up, you have to be working tirelessly on the product. This is what I have gathered from watching start-up school videos. It seems that people who are successful focus on building the product (and catering to their user base) for much of their waking hours.
I am being sort of a hypocrite though, because I peruse Hacker News almost daily! Haha, but I do spend a good amount of time trying to build a product, too. I feel less guilty about reading so much by taking action to try and counteract the lost time. At least, it works that way in my mind.
All the parts work separately but need to make a solid device that does not fail. I have talked to my friends in here, Europe, Australia and Asia- it works (https://www.facebook.com/w3voice has some video call photo) - they don't have the device yet- but my system works from browser with webrtc as well (no plugin required for firefox and chrome). The ssl certificate has expired (was using a 3 month trial) so can not share the site now. But prototype to product seems harder than I thought while doing weekends only. I even needed to buy a wooden box for this. This is frustrating because I am sure I will need to change things before people finds it interesting. So, need to build one as soon as possible. As it is now it may be actually a bad idea.
And yes, I live in Seattle area in Washington (west one). I did not think YC or anyone would be interested to find a solo guy working from living room with probably a bad idea in the first place (I have not applied to any yet- including YC). I was planning to complete it in a few months and go for them. I got few people interested to buy, so will have some customers as well.
[1] http://cbpowerandindustrial.wordpress.com/2014/05/09/work-ri...