I've worked with several of them and yes I do occasionally find that they would be the best suited for the work.

Matt Cutts went from Google to the US Digital Service and did some amazing work. Maybe he’s an outlier, but I don’t think so. There are a lot of supremely talented people willing to take a massive pay cut to do good, meaningful work.

Three things:

1. Exactly zero companies, much less startups, are like the US Government.

2. He had 2 years at the NSA prior to his Google run.

3. I'm pretty sure he's one of the highest profile google engineers, you're not getting that for $500k.