They did a lot more good by making a company rather than sticking around in academia and publishing a few extra papers.

I see this a lot in a project I'm involved with where the majority of contributors are from academia. The incentive is to mostly push novel things, often with questionable practicability, in order to write a paper about it.

But nobody will implement the 'boring' features needed to make the thing generally useful.

username checks out

not that I support this approach, but the return on public investment there is clearly huge