I have a former colleague from academia with a PhD in math (his focus was algebraic number theory) who works at Google...writing a lot of JavaScript - the kicker is he enjoys it a lot more than his time in academia (I feel the same way as a PhD dropout myself - I primarily write JS/manage engineers now).
I definitely believe that there must be people who enjoy this, in fact they are probably in the majority. It's just that some of us don't, and these are who startups should be pursuing.
