Article is confusing "startup" with "small business", if your field and your methods are old enough to be tried-and-true then, yes, by all means, apprentice yourself and learn the ropes. After spending the 7 or so years working in a social-networking company, you too can create another stable small-business in social-networking that (for example) staggers users' twitter posts or sells slightly ridiculous shirts to facebook hipsters. If you balance your books and keep at it, you'll probably make a handsome chunk of money and maybe even make it really big one day.
If your field / technology / process is dangerously new and untested because you just invented it (e.g. you're mining titanium from the moon using gravity fields, you're desalinating sea water, you're selling a headset that streams movies into your right eye checks your social feed in your left eye and sucks your dick), there's going to be preciously little other people and books can teach you. You've entered the realm of vague opinions, uncertain grey zones, and questionable futures. In that case, you're only choice is to either not do it and wait for more tests to return, or do it blindly in hopes of learning on the job.
PG and his cronies recommend the "just do it" path for startups in the second category because if you succeed, you'll find yourself in a temporary market monopoly where you'll be entitled to make astronomical amounts of money. PG and his cronies then invest maybe 1% or so of their utility while you invest around 99% of your utility. If your business succeeds, PG and friends get a 1.5x boost to their utilities, while you get maybe a 2x boost to yours. If your business fails, PG and friends shrug it off and offer you some words of encouragement as you pick up the splattered mess of your life off the floor and write a book about how the world wasn't ready for the movie-streaming-eye-sucking machine.
"e.g. you're mining titanium from the moon using gravity fields, you're desalinating sea water"
The fundamental disconnect here is that while there are some "startups" that actually do novel things, most are more like "build some ruby on rails app that does XYZ thing that has always been done, but do it on computers, and maybe cheaper than the big guy can by just ignoring existing regulations until we get big enough that anyone cares".
And then you wind up with a startup company probably full of 20 year olds who are smart and driven but haven't yet seen the hundreds of ways in which they can paint themselves into a corner with bad software practices which creates this negative feedback loop where everyone is working 80-120 hours spinning their wheels trying to get shit to "just work" whereas if they had more experienced technical talent (say people who have worked on highly scalable software at google or microsoft or whoever for 5 years) who have already "seen some shit", they would likely have much higher quality at a fraction of the development time.
(And while the salaries for experienced folks would have to be higher per employee, they could get by with a lot less of them and still have better code).
This is a little bit out there .... I think it is kind of confused. If you are mining titanium on the moon or whatever, then this will not be your first start-up unless you are already a billionaire and are willing to throw your money away or your "mining startup" is really you investing your billions into into someone that can do it, in which case it is not necessarily you "doing the startup" so I'm not sure it is relevant to the discussion.
Also, I think you vastly underestimate what kind of business knowledge is needed in running a successful business. Take your headset into the right-eye example, if you are a fresh-faced kid with nothing but an idea of how to put music into somebody's right eye, or whatever, you may not understand much about GAAP, manufacturing, how deals are brokered, etc.
If your field / technology / process is dangerously new and untested because you just invented it (e.g. you're mining titanium from the moon using gravity fields, you're desalinating sea water, you're selling a headset that streams movies into your right eye checks your social feed in your left eye and sucks your dick), there's going to be preciously little other people and books can teach you. You've entered the realm of vague opinions, uncertain grey zones, and questionable futures. In that case, you're only choice is to either not do it and wait for more tests to return, or do it blindly in hopes of learning on the job.
PG and his cronies recommend the "just do it" path for startups in the second category because if you succeed, you'll find yourself in a temporary market monopoly where you'll be entitled to make astronomical amounts of money. PG and his cronies then invest maybe 1% or so of their utility while you invest around 99% of your utility. If your business succeeds, PG and friends get a 1.5x boost to their utilities, while you get maybe a 2x boost to yours. If your business fails, PG and friends shrug it off and offer you some words of encouragement as you pick up the splattered mess of your life off the floor and write a book about how the world wasn't ready for the movie-streaming-eye-sucking machine.