I believe the way for more technically minded folks to approach startups is this: I will fail, I will fail many times, I can lose a lot of time and money. I should see if people will pay me before I build it.

Startups are REALLY, REALLY hard to make a living wage on the whole in a smaller period of time when selling things by the drip (eg: SaaS, Ecomm low price points, etc). The business is an art, which is different than the skillset engineers build up over years in their domain - yet want to achieve 'break even ASAP'.

Edit: Business is a very 'social sport' - if social isn't your thing, you have to: compensate, overcome, hire out, or fail.