I agree that building a product for customers is the end goal -- and that using every shiny new thing under the roof would be a distraction (with usual caveats/nuances of not being afraid to adapt new and promising technology when there's a good case to be made that it will bring concrete benefits -- e.g., Hadoop was a somewhat experimental platform in early 2008 and I was taking a technical risk introducing it in a 15 person advertising startup, but it was a huge net win).

However, to me love of technology is not playing with the latest node.js modules. While node.js is not my cup of tea, I can see how that be fun (I enjoy playing with the latest OCaml libraries, C++11 features, golang, etc..), but ultimately that alone isn't about technology. To me building technology is about reading a paper, extracting the core ideas, and applying them knowledge to implement a feature customers and no competitors offer is.

If we take this definition of technology, then there's plenty of place in startups for people who love technology. It depends on what the startup is building: if innovative technology (as opposed to an innovative business model) is at the core of the company's product, it's a great place for technologists. (There is of course nothing wrong with innovative business models -- nor are innovative business models mutually exclusive with innovative technologies; indeed, some of the greatest companies have combined the two!)

Now with big companies it is absolutely true that even if technology is not the core, challenges around availability, scalability, performance, etc... necessitate more than a trivial investment in technology.

"Startup" and "big company" are also not binary. I've joined LinkedIn when it was may be 200-300 people and even then we were solving some rather tough technical problems (you can read about some of the problems we solved in this paper that was accepted to USENIX FAST -- http://static.usenix.org/events/fast/tech/full_papers/Sumbal...). Although, the focus would have been more immediate had I joined LinkedIn when it was a 10 person startup -- but even at fairly early stages, the team was solving problems related to search and graph traversal, etc...)

There are people writing line of business code in 5000 person companies and there are people implementing query optimizers in FPGA in 10 person startups. It's very hard to make any generalizations and make categerical statements such as "if you love technology and tinkering, you should absolutely not work at a startup" or "to enjoy startups you have to love technology" (there are plenty of great startups founded by people who loved something more than they loved technology -- and these startups have made my life much more enjoyable as well!) I've done work that I am proud of in companies ranging in size from 15 to 14,000 people and learned tons in all of these environments (with various trade offs for companies of different sizes).

(Shameless plug: I hack on distributed systems in C++ at Cloudera -- and we do plenty of other cool things, despite not being a big company. Like distributed systems, databases/data stores, file systems, query processing, and more? Drop me a line.)