[majikaja]

I'm not sure if money is the bottleneck - I think billionaires are already throwing as much funds as they can to such companies. I don't think a few extra millionaires are going to make a difference.

I'm not particularly concerned about partially starting over in a new field - I'm not that old so my skillset is not particularly tremendous. If anything, I feel coming from outside the traditional system and already having financial freedom is a positive. When I was in academia (not CS) I didn't feel the standard of the people there was particularly great and my trust in top-down organizations is generally quite low.