That's nonsense. Evernote are a 'startup' in a sense, and have a desktop app (probably one of the primary ways people have interacted with it). It's literally exactly wha the author asked about.
It's exactly the sort of service that I want a desktop app for too. I mean, I stopped paying after it deleted a bunch of my content, but still…
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/evernote