As a European, I find it very funny to see how nobody in the US is willing to address the elephant in the room called Mossad. This looks more likely an israeli operation which sourced girls from russia and likely had the FSB as a customer/scratch my back I scratch yours/collab thing. I mean, most US politicians and the president seem to be on an "israel first" agenda.

I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following:

   A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business.

A friend of mine used:

   A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years. 

From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs that need to see the ligth. They should be supported by the government and the community, but they need very different tools from what we define as startups.

A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.