In my experience, consulting work of about ~ 1 year duration has been the most fulfilling project I have ever worked. It's not that I did not enjoy doing my own

In my experience, consulting work of about ~ 1 year duration has been the most fulfilling project I have ever worked. It's not that I did not enjoy doing my own startup, but you have to give too much of your personal time and energy. I had the opportunity to work with one of the government agencies, where I joined as a Lead Consultant and had to curve out the architecture, technology stacks, write boilerplate codes as platform, hired 2 Developers, work with the client to develop mockup, convert business into technical requirements, do hands-on development, make presentation to the clients for each iteration, rollout product, give training to end users and finally give credit to the team to have accomplished all these. So, essentially it's like building a product but you will be doing all these while someone is paying you and without having to go through the financial stress. I have found this to be a great advantage over the startup. I often envy the life of high end consulting hands-on architect who go to conferences for training, speaking, write Proof of Concept projects on new architectures/technologies, write books for various publishers and I am sure they must be earning more than any startup including equity!