The author started at Google post-IPO. That's hardly "startup" time. In a startup it's not like resources are given out like candy and there's massive amounts of free-time for working on 20% projects.
It's true that there are less meetings at startups, but there are other things that typical hackers find unsavory: developers also have to do sales, sysadmin, customer support and generally be much more aware of where the money comes from.
The thing that makes a startup interesting is that the company is the project. Frequent meetings aren't as necessary because the goals are usually easy to understand and fairly one dimensional, e.g. "We have one product and we need to increase the number people using it."
The way you'd make a big company more startup like would be to make teams far more autonomous and drastically increase the risk / reward gradients. Your product ships 6 months late? Your entire team is fired. You open up and sustain a new revenue channel that's paying big dividends? Everybody gets a $2 million bonus. Team leader disagrees with his boss? He can chose to do it his way, knowing he's risking his team's livelihoods.
I don't know if anybody's really crazy enough to try it in a large company.