Interesting. You seem to be defending inefficient bureaucracies (middle management etc) because you believe they promote more-human personal interactions. I've never really heard the corporate jungle described with such warm and fluffy sentiment.
I think it's tendentious nonsense, or anecdotal at best (did you just have a miserable experience at a start-up?), but rather than bickering about that per se, I'd prefer to offer a more important principle:
You cannot make an economy more prosperous by making things less efficient and spending more money on unneeded middle management.
You are confusing efficiency with distribution. It's clear that new firms are more efficient, but the median prosperity (your word) is also related to the way income is distributed. If a technical advancement increases efficiency by 5% but drastically changes distribution so that owners make 10x more than they use to, the average person loses.
Traditionally such advances could not stand for very long because competition would creep up and eat away at the innovators' margins, redistributing the gains to the wider public via lower prices. In the walled garden of highly monopolistic internet businesses powered by strong network effects, they seem to stand.
The line about startup employees does not even make sense, the individual contributors used by the likes of AirBnB are not employed in any traditional sense, nor are they entrepreneurs. The folks in Silicon Valley are doing great but the effects of what they are led to create has society-wide implications that you don't seem to grasp.
I think it's tendentious nonsense, or anecdotal at best (did you just have a miserable experience at a start-up?), but rather than bickering about that per se, I'd prefer to offer a more important principle:
You cannot make an economy more prosperous by making things less efficient and spending more money on unneeded middle management.