I like the ship analogy from the article. The fact it is so robust is not because the system as a whole is simple, but because its components have well defined, narrow responsibilities and there are abstract interfaces between them, which hide a lot of complexity. You don't need to understand the internals of the pump to explain what it does, even though the actual internal technology may be quite complex and clever. Also you don't need to understand the internals of the pump to design a rudder. This is a property that many IT systems lack. Insufficient abstraction leads to a network of components where you can't reason about anything without understanding all of it. And such systems often break in weird ways.
A startup is not a container ship going between port A and port B where everything is known.
A startup is a new destroyer that has been floated, did not have sea trials and went to war with a crew that might have a couple of people that used to a drive container ship but mostly staffed with kids that thought it was cool to play with a destroyer. Oh, and 3/4 of the systems are still at best have been drawn on a napkin and most of the rest came from a salvage yard. Oh and if you complete your next mission you may get money you can spend on some of the systems but if you do get that money you would be expected to do a lot more runs, quicker.
A modern startup is a destroyer that had all its core operations systems fedexed to the yard, as they were rented from the cheapest third-party service providers, and nobody on the ship has ever bothered to read the contracts, much less know what a "SLA" is. Inevitably, at some point in the middle of the ocean, one of these systems will get remotely bricked because the company that provided it went under or got acquired.
I would say a startup is a ship that has been floated. But it‘s unclear if it needs to be a destroyer or a cargo ship, or a cruise ship. Later on it may turn out to be a spaceship.
The reason why we consider shipping to be a simple and solved problem is that in 1956 McLean had a brilliant idea that to ship efficiently and well everything imaginable would be put into identical containers with no variations.
That's why it is possible to have a container ship with a crew of 5-6 people pilot the load. Containers aren't sort of identical. They are completely identical and completely standard ( several standard sizes ). They have the weight distributed in a specific way and they are stacked on a ship in a specific way depending on the weight of every container.
The startup equivalent of a container ship in simplicity is a startup sorting a pile containing A4 paper, standard business envelopes and hang folders at a daily rate of 500 items.
