I would have thought this was obvious- the archetype in Silicon Valley would be Fred Terman, but there are a lot of others. In particular, Arnold Beckman, who was an intern at Bell Labs where he learned to make vacuum tube amplifiers, moved to Caltech to be a professor and founded the amazingly successful Beckman Instruments company, invented the pH meter (which used a vacuum tube amplifier to turn the tiny signal into a useful one) and the DU spectrometer. He used his proceeds to fund the first transistor company in Silicon Valley, and made huge contributions to the US war effort.

I've worked with researcher/founders a lot; many of the people from my PhD program (Biophysics, UCSF) went on to start companies (Amyris, Zymergen) and we had strong educational pathways to learn how to start biotech companies. The two groups of people are definitely drawn from a highly overlapping distribution, although many scientists would make poor founders, and vice versa.