It's not 'either do bigco or do a start-up'. You could probably do great as a consultant or a contractor. That way you still get to write your own ticket and you avoid the (majority of) the stress.
I'm just bad at service, I tried being a contractor and then an independent consultant and it was a disaster.
I work for products, I need a team with the skills I don't have, I need to make mistakes and correct them on the way to a product that sells. I need smart people doing stuff I didn't know where possible that quick, I like to cut the red-tape and corp. foolishness for them, I like to bring candidates in the middle of the team and check if they fit or not, I like to say "sorry" to a customer after someone makes a mistake that wrongs them. I like going on skype a 3AM after a pagerduty alert and seeing we're 2 or 3 on the incident. And I like the fight against clutter and complexity inside growing companies.
