>Another thing I really want to do is offer a 4-day work week with the promise of sabbaticals and/or remote work. That might not be attractive to everyone, but it's something that would speak to me and that I would want in addition to equity and salary.

I think this would be a very strong advantage in the hiring market (assuming you can raise money from investors who're okay with it).

I'm not your target market (I'm just an in-demand software engineer who happens to be learning ML, not a top computer vision researcher), but this is something I'd be willing to accept substantially lower comp for.

Unfortunately most startups seem to require even higher work output than big tech.

Just an anecdotal data point, but some places have a vibrant tech scene despite paying jack shit. Salt Lake City, where I live, is one of them.

FAANG don't have offices here and don't offer remote positions, so no one is competing with them. As a result senior developers are getting like $130k or something, and seem to be happy with that.

Some people (myself included) don't want to move anywhere else even for $500k. So it seems like a nice little arbitrage.

Happy to chat, first initial + last name at google.

I think the answer is, know exactly how you want to exit before you start and plan for that. Realize also that is 180 degrees polar opposite of how the major VC's want you to approach it - so if you wanted institutional money from Sequoia etc... they won't invest if they know that is the case. There are a lot of good reasons why they take that approach, power law and all.

The reality is, your best case scenario is most likely an acquisition. Which might be exactly what you want, and if so absolutely go for it, but you need to really understand how and why and when the companies you are targeting do their acquisitions. This is incredibly hard to do if you haven't gone through multiple acquisition Due Diligence processes before, but I know of people who have repeatedly done this, so it can be done.

As to the other points, there are too many variables to say whether those are good ideas or not, totally depends on what you're trying to do.

My first startup used computer vision to extract tables from PDFs. We had great engineers but my co-founder and I didn't know enough about ML back then to design a proper feedback loop.

My advice is to find a technical co-founder who has built and scaled a CV system at a larger tech company, but who is looking for a new challenge. There are a lot of annoying problems that can be solved with CV as long as you create a way for users to help you get labeled data.