LZ, you really want to think this one through.
Here's my story. I worked at a start-up for almost 2 years. My boss (not my
advisor) was very smart, very good with technology, and very good with
people. He used to be the CEO of a ~200 ppl tech company. But his business
strategy was just too naive and too conservative. There was definitely a
void in the market that could be filled with the product he envisioned, but
the project scale was too ambitious for a 7-people team. We needed hardware,
software, RF, apps, basically everything. He had like 2 mil of initial
funding when the team was only 3-ppl big. Then one bad decision led to
another, when I joined the company (6-ppl at the time), they had already
blown almost all of the funding to develop their half-assed, buggy, piece of
shit product, which I spent many many months debugging and revising. And
did I mention management was just plain chaotic?
They are still in business but the chance of them hitting it big is
virtually zero.
Moral of the story is, even if your boss is smart and has good connections,
there are still many other things that can go wrong.
There will always be plenty of start-up opportunities around when you are
ready to take that risk, and it doesn't have to be now.