I’ve seen it all, from co-founding a startup that went on to have a $40M+ exit, to working at major tech companies, to, today, running a small business.
In my experience, the biggest difference between a startup and small business is that a startup feels intense pressure to scale up the business before the underlying fundamentals are strong. There’s a “land grab” attitude wherein investors are willing for the business take on massive losses the first few years as long as the company is building a moat around what they’re doing that will be difficult for competitors to penetrate later on. The idea is to build as much of a monopoly as you can early, funded by investment dollars, and “turn on” the revenue streams later.
A small business, on the other hand, generally scales hiring/marketing/sales along with their current revenue growth. It’s a bottom-up approach to building a business, wherein you scale as your company’s fundamentals incrementally improve. My current company is a newsletter-based business where we’re making fun of the tech industry (https://www.techloaf.io) where we’ve kept expenses extremely low, only hiring folks as the business improves.
Both approaches can make sense, it’s just all about your goals (both as an employee looking for work at either or as a founder building a company).