I think a lot of entrepreneurial engineers just want to be CTO or VP of Engineering or Product. There's a lot of selling and all that goes around that I think many entrepreneurial engineers are not predisposed to even when they can be good at it.

I know a lot of startup execs and enterprise execs step back after a while to rejoin the ranks of individual contributors for a while to catch their breathe. It was worse during the IPO dotcom boom where I had friends that really felt that as execs they were forced into ethical compromise in handling the finances and misleading analysts when they were running public companies.