It begs the question of why we (generally) feel like tech startups need to think/behave differently than traditional businesses.

"Startups" in the sense of new businesses have been around for centuries (arguably longer). But recently, the popular image of most tech companies is raising large amounts of money to grow/scale really quickly. If anything, shouldn't the fact that engineers understand how to leverage technology lead to higher profitability and lower need for capital than all the brick-and-mortar businesses that came before us? Like the SparkFun founder says, as an engineer, I started a company that I knew how to build and implement on my own.