As a side note, I personally find it hilarious to associate work/life balance with a startup.
I also spent 5 years at a well known startup that went public - I think I averaged nearly 12 hours a day over the 5 years there.
In my experience and from a lot of people I talk to, work-life balance is much better at a large Corp than a startup.
I get to do meaningful work, and my employer REALLY cares about me (the amount of training we get offered is amazing). UK so YMMV.
That’s not to say the DoD is inherently evil from the bottom up. It’s just that the things activists love to hate about FANG (potentially contributing to border control, selling technologies to foreign governments, data collection), the DoD does ten times over.