Hacker News is a software startup news aggregator, read by a large portion of the software startup community.  Articles bubble up to the front page as the community votes on interesting content.  A typical Hacker News article might be about a new Apple or Google product, or a new internet law the government recently passed.  Or maybe a neat Python tip, or a sweet tutorial for Go, Google’s new programming language.  The articles that catch my attention, though, are stories of entrepreneurs, both successful and failed, telling their tales of starting from nothing and ending with users and profits and fame.  These articles are intended to inspire us, to teach us about anecdotes that we ourselves can follow when we embark on the entrepreneurial journey that so many people in the software industry dream of.  But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about reading Hacker News, it’s that you become an entrepreneur by doing, not reading.

In the year or so that I’ve been reading Hacker News, I’ve likely read at least 50 stories from entrepreneurs that I look up to.  These stories–though inspiring and often interesting–all have the same theme, the same purpose.  These stories tell us that the road to entrepreneurship is paved with experience and risk and challenge.  To be an entrepreneur I need to be an entrepreneur.  I need to take the risk, pursue a passion or idea, and be desperate to learn how to shift and mold that idea into a business.

The road to entrepreneurship is well traveled, and certainly well told.  But I need to make my own roads.  I need to try things for myself.