Sure, but things can appear to provide lots of apparent value for customers and employees (i.e. the borrowers and loan-bundlers in the pre-2007 real estate bubble), until as you say, they collapse.

Also, just because a small group of people (customers, employees) may derive value from a particular startup company doesn't mean that that particular company, or the overall the ecosystem of startup companies, is creating more value than it consumes. The effect on inequality of the overall ecosystem is what's being debated here, and I'm not sure that anyone has a clear, data-backed understanding of which way it skews.