Can you define what boring here is? How does a boring startup be successful if it is boring? Genuine question.
(When did you hear about a startup that does a meaningful R&D?)
The easiest one are B2C:
1) Amazon - selling books.
2) Air B&B - renting rooms.
3) Uber - renting cars (advanced taxi).
4) Facebook - a database (My SQL) for Social Network.
But even "hard" tech startup:
1) Google - research done at Stanford.
2) Databricks - research done at Berkley.
3) Microsoft - No research at all, founders drop from college, Selling interpreters.
5) AWS - Research done at Cornell. Selling VM
6) VMWare - research done at Stanford.
Only today, we see startups (e.g. Cruise) that are trying to tackle autonomous driving, which is still an R&D problem, and see where they are.
As for being successful.
There are two risks in a startup - execution risk and market risk.
With boring, you take out execution risk.
For market risk, the main thing is timing (I.e. most of the market risk is outside your control).
You must be in the right market, at exactly the right time.
Hence you must start the project 2 years in advance and hope that the market will become "hot" when you finish.
R&D startups have proven that the only thing in their future is an acquisition (using Cruise as your example).
Again, if we define startup as "Growing company in search of a business model" then fusion energy falls completely outside of that.
You don't get "hyperscale" growth with science (biotech) or infrastructure projects (fusion energy). I'm unaware of any biotech startups that have grown to hyperscale. Genentech is the only giant biotech company I'm aware of and it was started 40 years ago and acquired before any kind of hyperscaling like you see with software startups.
Once you get that much going on, nobody can launch it all anyway. If you could, Thos Edison's lab or Bell Labs would have probably scaled most hyperly themselves.
As a technology marketer, I think you should have much more technology that you are not selling compared to what you are promising to deliver.
Even better if you can just keep the technology coming to delight customers more so as you go along.
Sometimes a highly scaled startup seems to define itself as an unsolved problem where there is exponential uptake begging for a solution. If someone can figure it out.
>I'm unaware of any biotech startups that have grown to hyperscale.
Genzyme[0] comes to mind, founded in 1981, went public in 1986 (raising 28.2 million [1]). It was acquiring other companies, building manufacturing plants at a pretty fast pace. Not sure if you would call it hyperscale.
What do you think about companies like spacex or tesla which are science heavy?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genzyme
[1]: http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/genzyme-cor...
Admittedly I'm not personally a technical person (I studied marketing and now work in sales), but as an example, just as I find it more interesting to work on the creation and process of making real world advertising than it is to do pure academic 'marketing' research.
Patrick McKenzie has an interesting bit on how running a software company is something like 90% not coding. That's where the interesting bit comes in, the actual business that surrounds it all.
But I think it all ultimately comes down to how are personally wired. Some people prefer working on pushing the limits of theory, others work on practical application, and some people work in the middle somewhere. All are good!
If you ask me, most PhD topics are hopelessly narrow and overfocused, if only because that's the only way to finish them in a decent amount of time. That's boring to me.
It's good to avoid confounding the two. Whether or not I find a problem interesting isn't a good bellwether for how solvable it is. If I'm starting a new company based around a product idea I want the execution of that v1 product to be as boring-as-in-predictable as possible, because there are more than enough risks at play already without adding 'nobody knows how to build this'.
There are sort-of exceptions of course, but the vast majority of successful startups are 'boring' in this specific way. As they should be.
Uber is a taxi with a website. Airbnb is a hotel with a website. Facebook is having friends in a website.
And that's not to say this is necessarily bad. As OP points out, it's this boringness that can lead to success for businesses. I as a consumer am not looking to radically change my life. I am looking for iterative improvements to convenience, etc. That's what startups often offer: an existing service but a little cheaper and a little more convenient.