Well... yes and no. One of the cool things about a system that lets one person create and grow a company, and another take over and grow it more, and another manage it for stability later on, is that it plays to everyone's strengths. The stability guy might be completely lost in a startup environment, and the startup guy might get bored at a big, stable company.
this often time requires skill/knowledge of a market, that frankly, many technologists don't have.
the company where I work does software for Natural Gas Companies -- no matter how great of a hacker one is, if you don't know Viscosity, dew point calculations, flow rate conversions and a number of Petroleum Engineering-related equations and problems, you couldn't do what we do.
oh, and the software goes for $5k a copy -- definitely not ad-based.
although tons of small start-ups are doing facebook apps, have they thought about solving the problems of the Universities who won't trust Facebook/ social networks further then they can throw them. CMS, Housing management software, etc. Universities pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for that stuff.
"no matter how great of a hacker one is, if you don't know Viscosity, dew point calculations, flow rate conversions and a number of Petroleum Engineering-related equations and problems, you couldn't do what we do."
combining hacking skills with deep domain knowledge (petroleum engineering in this case) would seem to be the alternative path. Of course you need to spend 3-4 years learning petroluem engineering, which may be a bit of a disincentive. But I think the point remains valid . Hacking skills + investment banking/chemical engineering/medicine/choose_your_domain knowledge would be a killer combination.
"oh, and the software goes for $5k a copy"
I am not surprised. I guess you keep upgrading it all the time for even more $$?
upgrades, new releases, and support ... it could eventually go SaaS I guess, but the Oil/Natural Gas Industry are not exactly forward thinking in how they want to spend their $$
