Ask HN: Hacking for the career, PhD for the fun stuff?

Lately, I think about hybrid opportunities. There is no doubt that my MS in CS had a better bang for the buck than staying for a PhD. But now, I tend to be a "pure IT" software dev and rarely work on deep, interesting problems.

I sometimes think that doing a PhD to scratch that itch to work on deeper stuff, maybe publish in journals without the "or perish" mentality, and be someone who can lecture/mentor the next generation of hackers while still earning most of a living from hacking work rather than chasing grants all the time would be an interesting life.

HN'ers are an interesting bunch - are there hackers on around here (other than our own PG) who have a PhD, mainly work on startups and in industry, but also do some research or teaching in a university setting on the side?

Did any of that subset plan to do that (as opposed to getting a PhD, planning to hunt down tenure at a university, but wound up doing startups or industry work instead)?