I don't think this is true at all. Jobs re-invented Apple in about 6 years and did an amazing job with it. Being a startup means lots of things. At the core of it is to stop worrying about what you have to lose. Apple was able to do this because they had already lost. Google may be able to do this before they lose in any meaningful way because that's Larry's personality. If Larry can do half the job that Jobs did in setting the bar for his company (vision, execution, product quality) then Google will do really well for the next ten years.
Without Tim Cook's ability to execute, Jobs' vision may never have come to pass. One person can't do it all, and, in particular, I don't think you can effectively be visionary and "execution-ary" at the same time. I think that will be one of Larry's biggest challenge.
So giant corporations that were founded in the 1970s are startups too? I guess "startup" is just a state of mind then. Maybe we're all in startups and we don't even know it!
"Being a startup" is not a binary condition. Startups possess many admirable traits and many big companies manage to capture some or many of these. And many startups have problems like politics or bureaucracy that you find in big companies. Saying that a startup is somehow conditioned on the number of employees you have is a naive definition of startup.
Clearly there are many big companies that have some of the burdens that come with that. And at the same time many big companies have managed to dominate industries for decades, make huge pivots, and innovate in new areas far better than startup competitors. IBM did a huge pivot in the 90s. Apple made a huge pivot in the late 90s. Xbox Kinect is actually some pretty amazing technology. Google building self driving cars is an amazing innovation.
To say that big companies can't be lead through big changes, can't be entrepreneurial, can't make pivots, can't bet their brand on one big vision/product/push, or any other trait we admire in startups is ignoring history and reality.
Jobs left and was rehired with the specific mandate to make Apple profitable, at a time that Apple was in deep trouble. Google is in a very different situation.
