Career Choice: Becoming a Researcher in a Non-EA-Priority Field vs Founding Tech Startup?

Engineering + math graduate whose goal is to maximize impact. I am currently deciding between two career paths, but have been struggling a lot to determine which would be more impactful:Become a professor/researcher in robotics, working on mainstream technical problems such as zero-shot learning. (To be clear, I’m not primarily thinking about robotics safety or AI safety, but rather general robotics capabilities research.)Try to found “low-sophistication” hard-tech startups — i.e. products that are not extremely technically sophisticated and could easily be prototyped in a local makerspace, meaning any wannabe hard-tech founder could easily make it.Note: For personal and practical reasons, it is unlikely that I would found a highly sophisticated hard-tech company, i.e. one that requires advanced fabrication / other specialized technologies.Has anyone here faced or thought seriously about a similar decision? If so, how did you decide where you had more counterfactual impact?One way I’ve tried is through estimating the number of “counterfactual days saved.” Here’s my crude analysis:If a robotics bottleneck takes 600 researcher-years to solve and 400 researchers are already working on it, adding me would move the solution from 600/400 = 1.5 years to 600/401 ≈ 1.496 years, or about 1.37 days earlier. If 50 startups benefit, and I work on three such bottlenecks over my career, that gives roughly 3 × 50 × 1.37 ≈ 205 startup-days saved.If I found five successful simple hard-tech startups, and each brings a useful idea to market one year earlier, that is 5 progress-years saved. This crude analysis is missing many important factors, but on first glance, it seems that the startup path is more impactful, assuming I am unlikely to be an exceptional researcher in robotics (which I think is probable). If anybody has a better way of comparing impact between academic and startup paths, though, would deeply appreciate it — I have been stuck at a crossroads for quite a bit…Discuss