For me, the applied skills I learned at a startup made me a much more attractive prospect. I can speak from experience about the relative strengths and weaknesses of machine learning models on real data, instead of the somewhat sterilized and over-used datasets often passed around in academia. It means a higher salary when I did jump ship into corporate-land.

Plus, it was just plain fun. Startups are the closest thing to the intellectual excitement and curiosity of grad school I've found in the private sector.