Yes, I saw this error line too and verified that the steamclient.so file was present. I think you're probably right about it being a pathing issue. The startserver script has this line:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.
which I guess leads to the server executable looking for steamclient.so in the current directory (".")
I might test this out in the future, but I'm to busy playing the game now! Thanks again!