I never said this and am slightly disappointed that you misquoted me nearly 5 months since we last were together — remember, I ENCOURAGED you to come to Startup School and even provided free room & board.

What I told you was my honest opinion — simple knowledge of C/C and basic PHP may not be enough to provide immediate impact at most web startups. On the skills side, I was suggesting that you try to pickup additional technical skills.

Experience and whether you’re ready for a startup is a whole other matter. Your only professional experience last March was JPL, period. If you’re going to start a startup, you better do so for the right reasons, and a big reason would be that you’ve seen enough of the “professional world” to know that it’s not for you.

Thus, by starting a startup, you know what you’re avoiding.

Along this line, your internship at JPL was a fairly limited datapoint. Aside from it being your first real “work” experience, it’s important to realize that government-affiliated orgs don’t operate like companies like Google. So, based on your “experience,” I suggested that you might want to do the Google thing before making the startup plunge to gain a better taste of what it’s like to work at a large company. If the Google thing doesn’t work out, at least you’ll know why you don’t want to work there, have a little more money in your pocket, and probably picked up some valuable skills along the way.