This is a really good idea. I'm still on my first game, but I can definitely see wanting to get into the production/trading side of things a little faster in successive games. However, the AI corps aren't particularly strong in the beginning. Maybe there should be a buff to them in this mode as well? Otherwise you might become the number one company in the first year or two.

Perhaps there could be some extra starting conditions when starting a new game, such as your quick start idea and maybe some other options such as starting wealth of the other NPC corporations. Basically some options to more-or-less tweak the difficulty of the game lower or higher than the default settings.