My assumption is that the author doesn't believe much in trickle-down economics. His last statement is particularly telling:

  Let me finish with a question: what do you think who 
  employs more people? A company like Facebook with a world-
  renown brand that is worth about $100 Billion on the stock
  market or a hundred companies that most people have never 
  heard of which are each worth a billion people?

The reality is that Germany's Mittelstand is full of SME's doing well for the themselves and employing lots of people. They have built themselves up using a very traditional model:

1. Idea

2. Borrow money from the bank

3. Employ people

4. Build products/services

5. Sell products/services

6. Profit

7. Re-invest and repeat from [3].

8. After 20 years of repeating - sell company, take-over, child inherits

Failure in this instance is often catastrophic to the founder.

I also think that there are a number of SaaS startups that are simply SME's and use the label "start-up" in order to try and get target investment from the VC daisy chain. Their model is often aimed at short cutting and gambling without risk to themselves:

1. Idea

2. Borrow money from investors

3. Build products/services

4. Sell products/services

5. Repeat from [2]

6. After 10 years of repeating - fail, acqui-hire, sell (and integrate) or IPO

Failure in this instance is often a learning experience to take into the next start-up venture.

One notable point that the author doesn't mention is the German adversity to risk. The average Germans doesn't take massive risks. The start-up model holds massive risks to investors, but or course the returns for success are equally huge. Germans would prefer a guaranteed 1.5% return per year to a risky 1000%. That isn't likely to change in the near future.