Related: It drives me bananas when a mega-corp makes a small R&D team and the job req says “we are a small startup in a big company.” The benefits, bureaucracy, speed of innovation, and equity all fit the usual mega corporate shoes, so it’s probably still a traditional role.
I was in one of these. We got equity and benefits, but we were explicitly exempted from normal bureaucracy. Our exec sponsor (and nominal manager) asked that we tell him before we launched or signed a big customer, and that was about it. Otherwise, we could do whatever we wanted with basically no oversight.
I'm pretty sure we could have gotten away with spending most of our time playing video games on the company's dime, if we had wanted. We probably would have been fired once someone found out, but that's pretty universal.
It does actually work out sometimes. I had the luck to be on one such team at Microsoft in the past, and we absolutely did have the benefit of cutting through much of the usual red tape etc, while still having access to megacorp resources.
But the only reason why it worked out the way it did is because the "owner" of the team in question 1) sincerely believed in this approach, 2) had enough clout with the top management to make it stick.
does not imply that ¬A => B. In other words, the logical structure can be correct, but that does not mean the premises are themselves true. This is the difference between validity and soundness in formal logic [0].
That's because most people do startups that are destined to fail. I've done plenty of those myself! The problem is that we think we can get away with building solutions looking for products. While a few of those do well, in general, that is a recipe for failure.
In other words, our success was because we identified a critical missing piece in a profitable industry and built exactly what people were asking for, and more importantly, willing to pay for.
After that success (and a couple more after it), I refuse to ever build something without finding customers first. You have to build products people want, not try to convince people into believing they want your product.
Startup is just another buzzword for a business. It's never been anything different than that. I wouldn't make any assumption about it based on the term, not the age, size, market, etc