[susan_hall]

This is actually more an aspiration than a reality of startup life:

" Grownups do the difficult thing when it’s the right thing to do, with composure. This means giving peers and employees critical feedback. It means saying the unpopular things about your startup’s product or service offering and assuming responsibility for failures. It means being really honest about the strengths and weaknesses in the management team. This strength comes from surviving and overcoming difficult circumstances. Grownups can do this over and over without losing credibility or support of the team."

But I agree that I tend to find more of this kind of honesty in small startups than in big companies, and for this reason I prefer to work with startups.