This is a good article but there is a causality problem. I know a lot of pure software companies in the EU that work like that. If software is your core business, developers are in the loop at every decision, if your core business is building power plants...they are not. Now the Marc Andressen argument might be that software eats the world and everybody should run their business like this, and that might actually be true or not. Beside this product/core relationship problem, I see one other issue and that are margins, many SV companies are comparatively young and are in new markets with high margins (or ridiculously high funding) these high margins change their way of doing business.