I doubt it will be possible, as the concept of SV-type startups is to be as Crichtony as possible. In fact, when they start to become boring you can often see VCs pressure the management to take more risk as a mere 2-5x return on investment is not enough to make the VC model work.

I expect that being a Grisham in deep tech either involves finding work in the research department of a more stable big tech company, or else in a research institute/university. If that is not possible and you can find/want only startup work, you can always try to uncouple your financials from work via FIRE methods and try to find autonomy that way. Be aware that you will find a growing friction with management and even your coworkers if you try that though.

Crichton is the cultural norm, I realize that. But does it have to be?

For example: I don’t mind the high risk / high reward thing, as long as it’s not me working 80 hour weeks under incredible stress to try to avoid bankruptcy. There are plenty of Crichton wannabes with all the necessary drive, energy and business acumen, but which lack the imagination and creativity to really succeed. Why can’t one of them do that job? I can be the creative guy behind the scenes.

Sure you can be an “expert” and live out your days in a corporate research lab or something. But that means you’ll have a 9-5 job with zero financial incentives until you retire. I think we’re heading into an economy where creativity, imagination and foresight really is the bottleneck. Is it sound that that work is then not incentivized at all?

If you can find someone willing to do all the hard work while you sit and ideate, sure that would be a lovely deal. There's somewhat of a stigma in the startup world against idea people though, precisely because they think that being creative "should be" enough to succeed. It usually isn't and to be "very" successful you need both the 80 hour weeks AND ample creativity. To be merely averagely successful you can get away with either hard work OR creativity, but TBH given your deprecatory remarks about 9-5 jobs it doesn't sound you are as Grishammy (yet) as your initial post suggests. :)

The cost is that there are a lot of people in the world who have the business skills to create a strong startup, but lack the technical background to create a compelling product. Meanwhile there are plenty of technical founders with great product ideas, but who must (best case) spend years of their lives building HR organizations and "selling" instead of innovating. In the worst case, they'll be bad at those specific tasks and will simply fail. Today's startup culture doesn't really have a good way for productive technical founders to get their ideas into the world without doing all the heavy lifting. Maybe our current system is the best possible system; it's possible there's also room for improvement.

Sorry wasn’t meant to be deprecatory remakes. I’ve had plenty of 9-5 jobs and I’m looking into getting another one now. Just wanted to be clear that they typically do not come with any incentives to excel, at least not here in Sweden.

Describing an idea in sufficient detail for someone else to program it is probably harder than actually programming it. Thus, the person who is just a hustler, or just an idea person, will get outcompeted by the person who is both.

I agree. I don’t want to be a 100% “idea person”. But I think I could be pretty good at the initial phase of “deep tech” startups: building a prototype, recruiting a team and raising pre-seed money. Perhaps there’s an established model where I could do that again and again? And if not, perhaps creating such a model is my calling. :)

That's pretty much the model. It just takes much more work than it sounds like. Building and pivoting the prototype to find product market fit, building a team that doesn't such and buys into your vision otherwise they don't work for peanuts, and selling that vision is even harder with investors for the capital.

If you can do all that with a Type 2 mindset, nobody is stopping you.

There are plenty of ML Engineers in big tech making $500K working 40 hours a week. Many have PhDs, which programs are also filled with smart people not working crazy hours.

Not in Sweden, that’s for sure.

Well maybe not in the “deep tech startup world”, but there are examples of successful long-term tech entrepreneurs, especially in SaaS.

A couple that immediately come to mind are the creator of the Epsilon editor and the creator of Pinboard.

I’m sure there are many others.

I would argue that outside of the Elon Musk tier of the deep tech world (and there's really only one person like that) almost every other person I know making measurable progress in hard technology is extremely focused on one thing at a time. The Crichton style 100-things-at-once approach grabs more headlines, retweets, and attention - but most of the engineers I know working on fusion reactors, electric vehicles, carbon capture, artificial intelligence, space travel, and medical advances are not trying to be VCs, entertainers, authors, and philanthropists at the same time they move their field forward.

Focus on running towards what actually moves the world forward and you'll discover the other people who are keeping up with you quickly. Don't worry about all of the noise around busier people working on other things. None of that will last.