No. A growing company is not necessarily a company designed for growth.

Startups are rarely profitable since a company designed for growth reinvests its revenue back into the company to create future growth (think a "ramen profitable" startup vs a "lifestyle business").

Large profits mean the company has run out of investment opportunities.

So in other words, your actual definition of startup is "a company that doesn't make any profit"?

Apple is designed for growth since their inception (when they were still a startup, by anyone's definition of startup) and that haven't changed much ever since (except, perhaps, on the Scully phase... and probably now, under Cook): they kept iterating fast on new products, predating their own margins with internal competition and all those other small things companies designed for growth do...

So a startup is mostly a pyramid scam on investor/IPO money, not interested in a specific end product (since they pivot) or building a profitable company (judging by what you say).

I'd rather have a lifestyle business, which at least until the nineties we used to call just company/business.

You know, like Apple, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe et all, despite not being startups are _just_ businesses.