There's no office politics in a micro company as there's no point, one person often has absolute power. And even if it's not one person, the founders will often trust each other a lot more than you. That's fine until you don't agree with one of them.

1. The case of the mysterious Piggy Bank

This caused a lot of problems at a 2 founder startup I worked at where the guy looking after the books was semi-inadvertently skewing everything in his favour, the company paid for renovations to the office that was actually his property he'd just bought. He claimed to have 'invested' £100k (leant) but he was constantly calling in those loans. But then putting some back. And then taking it again. In tiny chunks of a few £k here and there. And the accountants were incompetent and couldn't keep track (the semi-inadvertent part of it). It took me a month and a lot of late nights with paper accounts and excel to convince the other founder what was going on. When I cut through the accountants' mess I found at one point he actually owed the company £10k for a few months.

The only reason I started looking is because I couldn't fathom how we'd spent so much money.

The guy to this day doesn't really get what he did wrong, he viewed all his companies and his own money as piggy banks for each other when they weren't doing so well. But we were operating on false assumptions. Like we were profitable now, when in fact we had been profitable, but were no longer. Because we got rid of the good sales guys.

The mess was much bigger than that, with crazy salaries for mundane jobs and some employees he knew personally investing in the company as it was 'profitable' but expanding, when in fact they were investing to pay their own salary until one of his other companies had enough money to pay back an intra-company loan. Luckily they all got their money back.

Needless to say that period was crazy political for me and very stressful. On the plus side I made a good friend out of it that I still see today. And he learnt his lesson and never ignores the books now.

2. The Tank

A similar, funnier, scenario happened at my mate's old employer where one founder (CEO) had much bigger equity than the other (CTO). This was a 15-20 person company, kinda just past the startup phase.

The CEO also had a love of tanks. And a tank museum.

The company therefore went into the tank buying business. Which meant the company couldn't expand how the CTO wanted. This led to office politics, some supporting the CEO, some the CTO. The CEO eventually promised no more tanks.

A month later a tank accidentally got delivered to the company instead of the museum. The CEO was away, when he got back in the office the CTO simply took him to the back and pointed out the window to the tank. He ended up leaving to start a new venture and took half the staff.

TL;DR From personal experience I disagree, politics enter startups when things go wrong or the CEO has a love of tanks.