In tech, successful companies usually happen because a good idea was implemented in a timely manner and in the process there was no major screw up. Page & Brin

In tech, successful companies usually happen because a good idea was implemented in a timely manner and in the process there was no major screw up. Page & Brin didn't study "the art of startup". They were PhD students that created a good search engine that took off. Neither did Jang & Filo. They started by maintaining a webpage with links to other interesting webpages, that became popular and they grew it into Yahoo. Jobs and Wozniak didn't have any startup experience or knowledge on how to run a business. They had a good product. Justin Frankel created Winamp when in college and sold it to AOL for $50 million. I could go on. I'm sure that there are successful people who did it with your mindset of "I want to run a startup, any startup" but majority of success stories that I know about follow the pattern of "good product leads to successful business". With that as a context, I don't think there's much value in focusing on the "startup" part. If you can come up with a product that people want (the YC motto) and implement it, the "startup" part will happen. You'll grow into it. And the more successful the product, the more mistakes you can afford in the "running the startup" part and still be successful. The other side of it is that no matter how brilliant you are at the "startup" part, if you have lousy product, you won't be successful. See how Steve Jobs failed to make NeXT a success (he salvaged the business by selling to Apple, but it was more of a very expensive acqu-hire than a potential behind NeXT). So how to be successful at running a startup? Come up with good idea, implement it. If it turns out to not be good (and we never know a good idea until we try to sell it), come up with another idea. Repeat until you find the one idea that strikes gold.