[jiggy2011]

I wonder if some of the issue is that maybe that a lot of the people running startup type companies are perhaps younger and maybe less experienced than you.

So in a sense it might be frightening hiring someone with more experience, they might also be worried about your salary demands.

There also seems to be a (probably unfair) stigma that banks are where mediocre programmers go to die. So there may be a fear that you have been hopelessly tainted by Enterprise SOAP or whatever and need a 2000 page spec document to get anything done.

If you have skills writing performance sensitive code there is a market to be exploited in terms of contracting/freelancing as this might be a gap that can't be easily filled by more general programmers?