As somebody who just got our of school a couple years ago, and is trying get a startup of my own rolling, I have a few bits of insight. First and foremost, I'm

As somebody who just got our of school a couple years ago, and is trying get a startup of my own rolling, I have a few bits of insight. First and foremost, I'm not sure what your CS education was like but if it was anything like mine it was mostly useless. The vast majority of skills/knowledge I apply to development and design now were self-taught or I have picked up working as a developer for somebody else. It's easy to ready tons of great articles about practices, methods, etc but until you get your hands dirty and code some stuff that gets real world usage you may be at a disadvantage. For example, things like enterprise-level security practices, planning for scale, having redundancy and fall-backs in place are easy to envision and 'think' you planned for but until you are actually faced with a situation where those things happen you aren't fully prepared. My advice: score the best-sounding full time job you can get and see some live internal tools, business practices, backup processes, etc. Nothing says you can't code your dream product in your free time while still getting exposure to a real, working product/business (and making money to throw at your startup as well!)