I knew some folks at Google who were very content to stay an engineer at the bottom of the org chart and watch the people they mentored get promoted above them, because they understood that what made them happy was writing code and solving tough technical problems, not managing people or playing political games. I always respected them for that. Same reason that Steve Wozniak was always far more of a hero to me than Steve Jobs. It both takes more courage and provides more satisfaction to know what you like to do and figure out how to spend your life doing it than it does to become really good at what other people think they wish they were doing.

That said, I think startups will always be hard, for everybody, because no matter what you're good at, you will have to do a lot of other stuff to make them succeed. That's probably why the financial rewards for them are so high. Good partners can help at this, but maybe the sort of person who's naturally suited for a startup is simply "someone who likes to get good at a lot of different tasks".