But not everyone who has a patent is successful, nor is everyone who has financing from family and associates. There has to be something more.

OPs comic make is seem as if the employer has little knowledge of the business or the products of it. This couldn't be further from the truth in most cases. First, most businesses are small businesses. The owners usually started solo and grew, and are still highly involved in day to day operations.

A lot of big business originated from small business or the like. Gates and Behringer are examples of people who developed products hands on at some point in their career and do understand, or could understand if required, the products their teams now create. There are lots of reasons to dislike gates BTW, but this isn't one of them.