Boosted my first Tech level! Feels good. Summarized play report follows.
Skunkworks didn't appeal for me, I've not messed with that whole side of the evil corpo chairman life. Boosting my own payouts to max (12/sec) was a priority, but after that my instinct was to leave the corp's stats in the toilet as much as I could for the inevitable day when I had to face off against them.
By the time I was approaching my third TP cycle I was ready to upgrade Tools to tech level 6. Once I had two warehouses full of production going and the sales force to offload it, dumping all my Corp budget into Operations Managers seemed like the Nash play. I hit a half mil a minute pretty quickly after realizing that, and could just run the inefficient research techniques that didn't get attention, never touching skunk works or raids or anything that meant boosting the corp's stats.
I picked the Patent Boost that grants 5rep bonus per life. I'm no longer actually playing the game, at least for now, just skipping generations as quickly as the game will process my retirements so I can get those first-cycle-prestiges in hopefully 15 min instead of 15 hours.
It is unclear if there's a way to earn multiple PB at a time ala TP, or if getting that 6 point unlock will require starting and collapsing 6 corps from scratch. I'll probably try to push Tools to 7 next, since that seems like the most likely way to earn more points if such a thing is possible.