Not without good reason.
I have been on that side of the table. I have recruited my fair share of salarymen.
To be fair, some don't make it past the interview table. I'm not joking. "Where's my office ?" is a question I have been asked. Seriously !
The majority of the time it ends up being a dreadful mistake.
The truth is the corporate guys are too used to be hiding in numbers.
In the corporate world you are one of a team. You can ask your team members for help. You can push tasks you don't want off onto your junior team members. All luxuries you don't get in the small business world.
And, sadly, if you are largely useless, in a corporate world, as long as you keep your head down, you can float around as dead-wood until someone gets round to firing you, usually a decade or so later by the time the your manager has passed it up to HR and HR has got round to it ...
There's no room for dead wood in small business.
And of course in the technology sphere, in the corporate world you get to play with bigger budgets. The hardware vendors take you out to lunch. You get "enterprise support". You don't get any of that in the small business world.
Don't get me wrong, I have had some good ex-corporate recruits, but the majority of time its been an expensive mistake. Which is why I tend favour SME recruits overall.
The problem is that “ex-entrepreneur” is a title that anyone can give themselves by merely registering a domain name and a business one evening. The title attracts a lot of people who have no business being an entrepreneur or leading people, but want to be in charge of people and running the show.
That latter group is the long tail, and due to the inevitable failure of their startups those people are far more likely to be seeking jobs than the ex-entrepreneurs you want working for your company.
Having spent some time in local startup and entrepreneur communities, I have no problem believing that the average person who self describes as an ex-entrepreneur would make for a below-average employee. A lot of these people want to be in charge and tell others what to do more than they want to do the work, which is the opposite of what you’re looking for in people to work for your company.
big companies have processes that need to be followed
once you get used to process hard to go to shoot from the hip world of early stage start ups