As a student, consultant, sales engineer, and now, decision support architect, I always take notes and observations of how business is conducted and what I believe could be done to make things better. As a lead developer on a large scale data warehouse project for a major bank, I found that a small memory leak that grew over the course of loading millions of records was in fact huge consequently choking the system. So in business, inefficiencies here and there multiply to choke a growing company. My idea conveniently since this is the situation I am in is to be the equivalent of a fungus. Imagine your job experience as a piece of damp wood. Concentrate on forming a plan and feed off the experiences and observations and lessons learned in your job. I contend there are many ways build a company and working for 10-15 years first is an acceptable path. Build an application and business model as a labor of love as you support your habit with a 9-5 job. A company built out of love and lessons learned from others mistakes and one day grow and scale much faster because it's design was not flawed by the need to initially generate revenue with a product hastily brought to market with compromised , not well thought out engineering decisions.

As always, there's a balance. You can't slowly build something over years and not produce. You'll be in your 9-5 and before you know it, it's time to retire. A sense of urgency is important especially when you aren't at first getting paid for your efforts.