There's no real divide between startups and corporations in terms of talents from what I perceived. The industry was in general seething with talent.
it is at least true in sweden that the highest earners are not necessarily the smartest: https://fortune.com/2023/02/17/smartest-not-paid-most-wages-...
(i think this was on the front page recently)
Gotta find a good balance
My previous housemate worked in the tech recruitment industry, and he told me that the top end of the semiconductor industry tended to always pay better than the software industry, provided you excluded finance from the mix (where hardware engineers don't generally get a foot in outside of designing chips for HFT). Equally, though, the bottom of the scale was lower.
My personal experience supports that conclusion. As a graduate, my starting salary was dramatically lower than my university friends who went into software, but the jump in pay between grades proved to be much more dramatic.