Your description is so on the point I think many here will be able to resonate. I worked under one such owner myself! The flipside was that we were so often blocked by him that I got a lot of free time to experiment and learn.

This! I have been to such a company, sticked to ~10 employees for years due to managers and founding engineers firing people all the time and engineers leaving and coming within 1 year due to toxic micro management.

From that point i always ask questions about the employee count across the years, the projection and average retention.

In my current role, I've been lucky because we're in a market that IS very financially viable, but isn't HUGE. There's no push to grow crazy big or fast; the push is to keep the product ahead. And we're doing that, with a small team.

We will need to grow a bit in the next couple years, but mostly in (I'm guessing) testing and support.

Before this I was in some other small orgs with generally good management, but they failed. We had lean years at this firm -- there was a furlough period, with 4-day workweeks and 80% salary, and I thought about leaving but honestly also enjoyed the extra day off, too.

We made it over that hump, and are now doing well. My main concerns at this point are leadership succession at the top, and also at the top of the actual dev group. The latter is more easily addressed than the former.

I worked there! Canadian company. Seemed very determined to stay a small company while having huge aspirations.

I feel there is a story here...