Don't take on investors: make a product that earns money. Don't hire full or part time employees: find intelligent automated solutions to tricky problems or bring on contractors as necessary. Having control over what you make and when you make it means (for me, at least) more sleep, more money and less wasted time making someone else's dream a reality.
I'm all for exploring unconventional lifestyle design patterns. And I have been nursing certain plans of becoming a techno-hippie :)
A lot of my friends work for the Wikimedia Foundation, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Tor, and so on. There's no possibility of walking away as a zillionaire, but neither do you have to work with (or for) dickwads who are only in it for the money and who are out to screw you out of your share. And if you're any good, there's a guarantee of doing something significant that you can point to later on your resume, should you want to go the entrepreneurial route. These organizations are global, so you get to do a fair bit of travelling too.
Non-profits have their own special brand of problems, but if you tally up the pros and cons they are definitely an option.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/careers.html
I don't think you get a job at Tor without being personally known to the developers. Volunteer, I guess.
Obviously this varies depending on where you are in the organization. But the bottom line is: there are always dicks, and they always try to screw somebody (that's what dicks do), and in startups, there are probably more of them because millions is more interesting than power over a few people.
There are billions of people on this planet. Do you think that the ones who aren't in Silicon Valley startups are all miserable? Their lives aren't worth living?
Ok, but more specifically. Let's say you want to lead a creative existence, working with technology, and you love the SF scene so much you just have to live here. You don't need to be in a startup for that. As they tell you to be frugal with a startup, be frugal with you life and all sorts of possibilities open up.
I know a number of people living in "hacker homes" where they drift in between working on startups, technology jobs, and then working on projects that just interest them. Sometimes they'll take an entire year off work to do something with no monetary gain, like a Burning Man or an open source project. You might have to live in an less desirable area with a lot of housemates, but once your rent is sub-$1000 and you cook most of your own food, you can live for an entire year once you've pulled off a couple of consulting gigs.
You're young, and I presume you don't have a spouse or kids, so this option is very possible for you.