Comment by version_five

I saw a similar situation once where a funded company hired "the smartest" people with the downside that they felt they had to let them do what they wanted to be competitive. The downside was you got people who wanted to do what they wanted instead of work on business-relevant stuff (almost with the kind of academic allergy to something "applied") which ends up being a pretty entitled, political and disagreeable group, and that once you've given people the freedom, it's almost impossible to go back and ask them to do something.