The word "startup" was only recently coined. We didn't know what we were doing. At all. All the standard business knowledge and tech knowledge that is comon knowledge today had not yet been figured out. Incubators were not a thing. The VC market hadn't yet figured things out. Hype wasn't about getting a huge exit, it was about people paying you millions for a static HTML page that happened to get some traffic. And simply the ability to put up a site could be a viable business. There was no tie between business value and company worth. It was all chaos, and truly a wild west type environment.
As far as the work environment, it is exactly what you read about. A few guys in a basement or a garage. A desktop sitting next to you as the server. Slinging code and trying to get it to customers. At my first startup, we didn't even have an internet connection - we developed on a local LAN, and transferred the deliverable to the clients via FTP from home, or sometimes even via disk. We got a few customer and rented an office space, and then had 6 guys in 3000 square feet of open space with a few folding tables. Later, we were able to build out walls, hire more people, and make it a real office.
We went public, had lots of paper numbers next to our names, and then it all crashed.