Agreed, I am 40+ and am a CTO at a startup which has great work/life balance. We pay approximately market (for a normal dev job, not FAANG), haven't had people do overtime in well over a year, are transparent about finances, and have practically zero politics. It is also possible for a startup to be "stable", especially if it's bootstrapped/profitable.
'have practically zero politics' tingles my bs-meter. How would you know how your employees feel about this? There is always politics. Of course not for the ones who cannot be promoted further, but for everyone else. My boss not acknowledging the existence of politics would be a red flag to me.
Politics isn't just about promotion. It's about what kind of work people get to do, whose opinion is respected, etc.
I don't care about getting promoted in my current role (at a small start-up where the eng org is flat), but I'm miserable because there's obviously a clique of people who are "trusted" and take over the technical direction of anything interesting. What's left is basically just implementing their ideas and then having them rewrite it on you or nitpick it in PRs until they practically wrote it.
I have worked in plenty of places where there is little drama. These are usually run by well respected, competent managers who are also transparent. If you always run into office politics, the problem could possibly be you.
Three people on a road trip have politics. There are degrees though.
I’ve worked in places with nasty politics. It’s brutal and awful.
In a smaller place with a flatter org, you’re usually going to have less nastiness, for the simple reason that there aren’t any bullshit roles with organizational power. Bullshit attracts assholes.
When small companies suck, it’s usually because the owner is a jerk.
You might work at a small or young company that is not a startup. A "startup" is a specific type of business designed for rapid growth. If there are profits, that means holding cash in a bank offers better returns that re-investing into sales/operations which implies there is no fast growth.
We are small (<$5M ARR) and were indeed re-investing excess cash into hiring/ops, which actually caused significant problems when COVID hit and our revenue dropped.
So I'd call that a startup? It's not like we're not trying to achieve rapid growth, we just haven't found the secret magic yet to turn into a unicorn. Doesn't mean we're not trying.
Loose definitions of "startup" means there will be lots of exceptions or talking past each other when one tries to make declarations about the nature of startups.
One popular definition of "startup" (Steve Blank's) basically precludes profitability.
