> "Businesses that are good for society need to grow quickly to actually reach a large fraction of society"

That is not true (and is more relevant to manufacturing than to tech companies). Look at ARM, for example, it never needed to grow rapidly and it doesn't actually produce stuff - it just licenses intellectual property - but the existence of ARM benefits millions. Would this fledgling firm in the early 90s Cambridge not be called a startup (was Apple dumb to fund it as a joint venture?) - would VCs not have liked to have a piece of it in the early 90s?

EDIT: Same goes for id, Valve and other game studios - you see sometimes it's better to have the best engineers and researchers take their time, let them develop and mature the technology they're working on and build something long-lasting that affects millions of people.