[nickpsecurity]

"Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory?"

Good point. Several, nice examples from my field of study are AbsInt, Kesterel, Galois, and AdaCore.

https://www.absint.com/products.htm

http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html

https://galois.com/blog/

http://www.adacore.com/academia/projects

AbsInt turns elite work of Ph.D.'s into commercial products and enhances them. Doubt it's boring. Kesterel has people doing academic-style research on hard problems and applying it to real-world. Galois does that too. AdaCore does a combo of tooling for grunt work, advanced tooling (esp compiler), and cutting-edge work (eg SPARK provers) involving academics remote or in-sourced. A good PhD in relevant subjects might get a job at any of these companies with similarly interesting work. Or, if tool is good enough, make a company out of it by partnering with people good at the business/sales side.

So, definitely opportunities here beyond black and white of academic-only or grunt work.