Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path(blogs.nature.com) |
Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path(blogs.nature.com) |
I think "startups require almost the exact same skills as science" is true only in the broadest sense....like, doing work of scientific value is hard and requires intelligence and discipline, and this is also true of startups.
It is also true that there are many people who are exceptionally good scientists who are not good entrepreneurs (and wouldn't be if they tried), and vice versa.
Say you average $x per year for 3 years, then your startup fails, so you join bigcorp at $y. So at the end of 4 years you have 3x+y.
Your conservative classmate joins a bigcorp and stays there 4 years averaging $z per year. So he now has 4z.
It's a simple exercise to enumerate tuples (x,y,z) where 3x + y > 4z.
Literally in every case I have seen up close and personal, the LHS exceeded the RHS. And I'm not going to argue with math.
A failed startup can be very expensive. You might break even. You might not. Just from the financial perspective on it, when you start including negative and near-zero values on the left side of that equation, conservative job at bigcorp starts looking good.
Then think about the rest of your life. Surely there is some value in getting enough sleep, having free time, work-life balance (because your work isn't 100% of your life), and a basic level of security. Startup life sucks; there are far fewer people who have what it takes (including luck) than there are people who think they do.
On top of that, nobody tells you, but when you go to get a real job after starting a company? If you didn't have big-name VC, "Oh, that was your company?" the interviewer asks... but what the interviewer clearly means is actually "Oh, so you were unemployed"
I mean, I'm not saying that you shouldn't start a company, I'm just saying that you need to be mindful of the risks. Yes, you feel free when you are young, but any money you put into retirement then is extremely impactful. The same is true of anything you put into covering your long-term housing short.
Even if I could talk to myself in my early 20s, I probably could not talk him out of starting a company, but... i would be way better off now if he could have been talked into being more conservative... into maxing out all available tax-deferred retirement options, into limiting the amount of money and the amount of my self that I was willing to sink into the thing. Into buying a fucking condo, at least. Something.
Better advice: if you want to do a startups, get some experience, find some good partners, test out ideas in your own time, and when you have enough runway and something that looks solid, only THEN make the leap.
This. I have a PhD and a failed startup. It felt real bad, and I didn't get that far with it (9 months before calling it quits). Creating a successful startup requires significantly more energy and stress than most science jobs, even for pre-tenure professors.
It requires different skills than science. Few introverts will succeed at founding a company, for example. Moreover, you have to produce actionable results quickly, and you have very different success metrics.
I'm one degree of separation from a PhD startup founder that literally killed himself as his startup imploded, when the company was 5(?) years old. Severe depression, loss of all semblance of a life... these are standard in the world of startup founders. The risk that you destroy your life is real.
Of course if you are so introverted that you are unable to make eye contact or talk to people it will be a problem, but most of us are not that extreme.
Especially so for PhD recipients. Unless they're from money, they've probably already spent their post-grad years living very modestly. Starting a startup just extends and amplifies that, which can be dangerous.
This is comically obvious when you look at some successful startups... My brother joined one (not technically as a founder, but he left the same company as them to join as a day 1 employee). They occasionally post PR pictures of themselves. They all look ridiculously like successful, smiling, talented and dynamic people, the kind of people a VC probably likes to see. Except my brother, who looks totally like the bookish introvert that he is.
Well well, I figure smart VCs knew that they have good reasons to have that one guy around.
That fear is one of a few reasons why I don't think I'll start a startup any time soon.
Or the social and economic safety net.
Also, if your product is similar to another you may get caught in costly legal battles but this is unlikely to occur as a scientist. It will most likely "just" tarnish your reputation.
While the monetary rewards of creating a successful company exceeds a good academic career it is, as the author points out, high risk.
I wouldn't call a high risk gamble that has possibly detrimental long-lasting effects over your life and your co-founders life "sensible". I'd call it a gamble, as that is what it is.
Comparing the two situations I'd argue the business option is far better for a number of reasons. The most important being freedom. To survive in academics now is an awful game of proposals and nonstop stress. Success rates are very low and there is intense competition. And all for very little (no) payoff. And it is a sales job. At the end, before I finally pulled the plug I often likened academics to a situation where you're selling something that people may like, but they don't want to pay for it. If you do it right with a company, people are begging to pay you. And the reality is the business route is much more challenging, just in a different way. Everything is on the line.
I do think promoting a "startup" in the conventional sense where you have VC funding and explosive growth is disingenuous. There are many opportunities where a PhD scientist can carve out a niche where you have a company with 1-10 million in revenue. It affords an excellent situation that, if sustainable, is orders of magnitude better than the academic lifestyle that is so often idolized.
When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life.
My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.
A Ph.D means you have higher than average IQ and you have grit, honestly, without will-power no body completes Ph.D. which have great correlation of success.
You can learn marketing (which is very important), improve you EQ with seminars but Depth of Ph.D. and grit to the finish line is not easy to get.
Its not automatic, but I agree with the essence of the article.
edit: I am not a Ph.D.
Finally, consider that, upon entering a doctoral program, many students don't intend on academia at all. That number drops by the time they complete their dissertations, too.
Ultimately, I'd give a rough figure of 1 in 4 qualified and motivated PhDs getting a suitable tenure-track position in a reasonable timeframe (~4-5 years). Maybe one in five or six will get tenure, in the end. Which is still terrible when you think about it, but the odds aren't nearly as ridiculous as some would claim.
My feeling was I can work a lot of hours for little pay and questionable benefits as a post doc or start my own thing. I use 'start my own thing' since I hadn't ever heard of doing a start-up being in the Midwest.
Would you mind explaining what you mean by that?
* Years of grunt work. You just did that on your Ph.D. Don't kid yourself, start-ups are just as hard and can take longer before they are successful. As they say in show biz, it takes years to become an overnight success.
* Business smarts are non-optional. If you are in a leadership position you need good business acumen. (I.e. like Andy Grove, not like Bill Shockley.)
* You need to be an all-rounder who can roll with the punches and pitch in to do whatever needs to be done. Chances are only some of that will be science and some fraction will be downright unpleasant. My personal favorite: the head honcho in a small company is the top of the product support escalation chain. By the time users get on the phone with you they are often downright steamed.
Finally, if you don't fit the mold there's a reasonable chance you'll either just flame out nothing to show for it or get fired. That's in addition to all the normal stuff that goes wrong when you have a good idea, good funding, good co-founders, etc. Doing a startup is not for everyone.
"According to the Start-up Genome Report 92% of high-tech start-ups fail. ... If you can get as far as investment this number falls to around 40%, and your chance of making it big within that sits at around 10% (Pitchbook). This adds up to a 0.48% success rate overall. Interestingly, this is the same proportion of PhD students that reach professorship."
Hmmm.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest ulterior motives are in play here.
Um, yes except for the part about paying for food and shelter ??
Interestingly, this can be justified by economic theory, because it's the marginal price of the next transaction that everyone sees, so you always need someone who's willing to buy in for a higher price.
Once everyone has already bought in and there's no fresh money to prop up the bubble, everyone can immediately see that, and things fall apart just like you said.
When we ignore the social component of our lives, big surprise, it atrophies and dies. I have a PhD because many people (a society) invested in me to get one. My PhD is not something I should use for my own enrichment by building a "career" and a "startup" to satisfy my job requirements, there should be a substantial portion of my effort that is socially directed, that gives back the enormous amount that was given to me to get me here.
This is why I will remain stuck in academia forever, desperately seeking that shrinking universe where someone can attempt to produce pure public goods.
This seems wrong to me.
This may be true for consumer facing products or tech investors like YC, but it misses that biotech investors have been investing $1B+/quarter into science based startups for over a decade now [1]. I suspect that as far as absolute numbers go traditional biotech investing still dominates in this space.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucebooth/2015/07/23/the-ventur...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Essential-Guide-Turning-Ph-...
I recently enquired about a possible career at a small (<50 people) consulting firm. They do mathematical modelling and consulting and have scored a few high profile contracts. The work is interesting, easier than the typical Ph.D stuff and yet still challenging and varies a lot.
BUT! They pretty much only hire Ph.Ds. Why? It's mostly a reputation thing. When they send you to help out a client they don't want to send somebody who "only" obtained a masters.
The firm was started by two Ph.Ds out of school and could essentially be considered a startup. Barely 10 years old I believe.
But the overall point is interesting. I feel there's a slight bias against academics from "the startup scene" or maybe I'm just imagining it being a mediocre scientist thinking about starting by own business every now and then (so not the super duper elite MIT guy). I've always felt that some of the stuff you learn by practicing science is fairly valuable even in a web based startup. Depending on the field you're more or less forced to get a better understanding of statistics and rigorous testing (with all the pitfalls involved) and the general hypothesis/test-it cycle is really helpful for startup life as well. For me the sad trade of is that my programming skills (mostly the secondary skills like architecture, being up to date on databases, refining the vcs workflow, testing etc.) erode slowly. I also have a lot less time for side projects these days which kind of sucks. [I haven't taken the traditional academia career path and actually worked at a software company before so I feel like I have a decent grasp on both fields]
If you feel compelled to start up a company, I say do it.
Put yourself 100% in. You might be 100% successful, or, you might be 100% a failure. But do not think the statistics make you one or the other.
Only advice I would give is to get yourself on decent financial footing before making the leap. It helps you from making impulsive/bad decisions later.
Your startup journeys could succeed but the odds are against you. Though, whatever its a ton of fun and the stories that come from it make you a more interesting candidate when going up for your first Developer job.
I had two startups fail yet I was able to raise incubator money for both, invited and had a demo meeting with Google, invited and filmed for a reality tv show about makers(I think I maybe a good marketer hence these opportunities yet I suck at people skills) and a lot of other random out of nowhere stuff.
Overall, great times with many lows that are now great life stories even if I'm not a millionaire I now earn a good living coding.
This is true in the sense that the amount of VC poured into things such as social networks or SoLoMo startups is decreasing and the amount of VC poured into things such as machine-learning based startups is increasing. Even though the amount poured into the first is still larger than the amount poured into the second.
However, this article shouldn't discourage people with just an undergrad (or even without an undergrad) to start startups. A group of 22 year olds might know about Deep Learning and might just apply it as a medium to a solution in a different narrow domain than a group of 40 year olds will.
Yes - they have the smarts. Yes - they know how to learn (but are sometimes arrogant enough that they won't). Yes - they know how to work hard. But there's something about the academic culture that makes for ... I don't know. Something. I haven't nailed it down, and I wouldn't go so far as to claim "advanced degrees considered harmful", but startups are hard in a different way than academia prepares one for.
That said: you learn a lot in the first one. And get to learn more about the wrong lessons from the first on the second. Why not give it a whirl?
Proposals and Stress = Check
low success rates and intense competition = Check
Need for sales = Check
I can't help but think you essentially have the same situation in academia as one has in a startup, only "it's different." The difference to me is the illusion of control. One may think that they are in control of the startup vs. the bureaucracy of government/academia/established business.
I posit that most things that are required by business are, in fact, not under your control. The illusion of control is there and one may feel that actions are leading to certain outcomes, but the truth is they have no direct control of the outcome. "Luck" plays the same role in the bureaucratic or private enterprise affair... some have it and others don't.
Just look at the Yo app. They got $1 million in investment (for some reason). Their technology was nothing special, in fact it was literally written in a day. But their CEO apparently had an in with some investors, or they were _very_ good at sales/pitching.
I'm not discounting the difficulties present in each scenario (or the luck). However, after ruminating about all the pluses and minuses, I believe one is likely better off trying the business route.
As a business owner that meets other business owners every day I believe "luck" is not that important.
There is a lot of space for normal business in the world, that solves a problem, give a service or creates simple products. You can be good at it or not. Most successful owners I know are not lucky at all.
Luck applies to the "changing the wold" thing, but 99% of business are not that way. People at HN has a distorted view on that reality.
Not as low or intense as academia IME :(
Maybe don't belittle things you've never done?
Doing a PhD is not just sitting down and writing a thesis, and it's also not just taking a few classes that occasionally require late nights. A PhD student is typically teaching one or more classes, learning as much as possible about his/her field, reading papers at the forefront of research in his/her field, conducting original research, writing papers on one's research, preparing and giving talks at conferences and seminars, along with writing the thesis and (at least in the first year or two) taking classes.
My thesis was in fact just over 100 pages. It also required a lot intense studying (on top of my basic undergrad and graduate education) before I understood the topic well enough to begin to do research on the topic, and quite a lot more work before I started to find worthwhile original results to write about. Here "a lot of work" doesn't mean a few late nights, it means years of working as much time as possible every week.
As someone who was in the working world for almost 10 years before returning to school, I assure you my thesis represents a lot more hard work than anything I ever did in "the real world."
All that said, this article is nuts. Very few PhDs are in a good position to launch a startup. But not because PhDs "know nothing about life or work," and not because they are unfamiliar with hard work.
Maybe I'm interpreting the GP post wrong, but I take their use of "hard" to mean "unfair and stressful", and your use of "hard" to mean "high quantity and quality of work."
1) A PhD is a very personal experience, but hard work is the common denominator.
2) The article is off - very much because there is a multitude of outcomes when it comes to personal development during a PhD.
It is an obscenely grueling path that let me know it wasn't one I wanted to head down.
It might be the case that a PhD is very hard. My idea of it is just based on third-party observation and discussions with people who have done it. I suppose some people have a harder time than others.
I worked on two open source projects for 6 years in total for about 20 to 30 hours every week in addition to my 40 hour per week day job. My first project had around 500 commits and was about 10K lines of code. My latest project has well over 1000 commits and probably 15K lines of code (I contributed about 80% to 90% of the code and it went through several rewrites). I also wrote the documentation for the project mostly on my own - There are almost 30 pages of technical documentation - About 15K wordcount. I did it for $0 - All I got out of it was experience, industry connections and some nice job offers.
I feel like I worked hard. Almost certainly harder than anyone I know. But I know for sure that some people on HN will read the paragraph above and think that I'm actually a lazy entitled millennial.
Part of the reason why it was easy was because I knew that if I put in the effort, I would almost certainly pass the course. At uni, if you're smart, the odds are always stacked firmly in your favor.
Failing a PhD thesis during the defence is apparently a 'rare occurrence' in most universities.
By contrast, the odds of your startup not failing are like 10%. Now if we're talking about actual 'success' then that's like 1% or less (it certainly feels like that from where I'm standing).
With these sorts of odds, you don't have this feeling of 'meritocracy' that you might get if you came right out of uni.
>Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.
You already said you didn't get a PhD, you didn't need to say it twice.
Except if you stubbornly decide to fully understand LaTeX in the process.
Though interestingly, having to be more deliberate in my operations do make me have a much more rigorous understanding of what I'm doing.
Finishing assignments is to what a PhD student actually does is as `printf("hello world\n");` is to what a developer does.
What is hard is the work that you have to go to to get to the 100 page thesis. Try working a 100 hour workweek, including sleeping the lab only to find out that the experiments that you've set up completely go to hell because of a minor detail that you missed at the beginning. Five or six times. (with 75 hour workweeks in between) Over the course of a year. Not taking any vacations. Five years over.
I'm a phd student and my idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since I started, too. The master's was child's play. Now it's about determination and finding avenues forward when facing problems that are so large that even finding a good question to ask is a major success. Staying up late and putting in the hours is the easy part.
This is not as simple as you imagine it to be.
This. I was just considering this last night, since I was back on my university campus again. While I subconsciously knew the work I was doing in school wasn't real, I still attributed value to it. Looking back, while it had value, it was fundamentally different value than real work. Its value was most temporal, i.e., if I got it done on time, it was valuable. This has little to no direction correlation to real life.
Hard work is valuable when applied to intrinsically valuable work, which will be valuable if you finish it today or tomorrow. And in general, a missed deadline is bad, but doesn't reflect on the intrinsic value of the work (there are exceptions, of course).
Hard work is worthless when applied to intrinsically worthless work, regardless of when or how it is completed.
If you got through uni by doing this, you went to a bad uni. Same goes for your statement about a thesis. I feel like you don't really have an idea how tough academia can be. Your comments are smug and condescending.
That said, definitely keep my gpa off my resume.
I used to think staying up 24+ hours working on something was what hard work meant. Today, for me, hard work means getting adequate sleep, making sure that I have great energy so I can function for 10 hours a day on my personal projects, school, work, and wellness.
Sure, many PhDs are eminently capable of starting a startup and some will be wildly successful. But that's more likely to be because they have a burning desire to commercialise their research or a great founding team sees their skillset as the missing link than because they couldn't find an alternative
Yes - the IQ, work ethic is there. But they are differential.
All the succesfull business people I know have been 'hustlers' since grade 1.
Look at the early emails between Zuck and others at Harvard. Age 19 that kid was already a baby shark. Very cynical, competitive (granted, it might be an ivy league thing).
Successful entrepreneurs I find are more like Trump than not.
And I don't think that Google and a few others are good examples. Aside from the 'top 10' big companies, you'll find that most are classical alpha dudes, really hustling hard, trying to make $$$ any way they can, focusing on those outcomes.
PhD's tend to be very deferential to authority, they believe in 'true outcomes' (i.e. some kind of real progress) etc. when often Entrepreneurs don't care that much: have produce, hype it up, make money.
Steve Jobs was a hustler, not a scientist. Taking credit for others work, massively leveraging over his own staff (taking their equity etc.). Gates, Ellison, Benioff, same deal. Travis K of Uber I think is much the same, and in many ways I think Zuck as well. Bezos. Even a lot of the 'shy' type CEO's, I think, are still inner hustlers.
Obviously these are huge generalizations.
As for correlation with success, I wonder if you could elaborate? What measures "success"? What studies are you referring to? What confounding issues (if any) are accounted for?
Do you have any particular reason for stating this? Having been in both environments, I actually think that academic grit translates outside of academia more fluidly than the other way around.
Conjectured reason: most academic projects have a horizon of 5-20 years to market and require large amounts of very mundane and uninspiring work. There are infinite distractions within academia. A successful academic project isn't going to make anyone rich, and even if it does, that person probably won't be you. Also, the pay is terrible.
Startup and even corporate life are very different in almost all of those dimensions. Projects succeed or fail fast. There are few distractions, especially for individual contributors. There's still routine work, but usually routine in the sure-to-succeed way rather than the sure-to-fail-and-be-repeated-10x-times way. A successful project can easily make you a valuable person -- either on the job market or in terms of actual net worth. And even if everything hits the fan, you're receiving a reasonable salary and building your career.
> It's also debatable whether a PhD absolutely implies an above average IQ
That is certainly true.
However, I do agree that "grit"/"will-power" is definitely required.
I see your point and concede that if you have research in an area with no funding, you are most likely dead in the water.
I don't see how that is any different than a business. The simple fact remains that you have no control over what is going to be "hot" and what is going to be "dead." How many times can you afford to be wrong? That is the ultimate question, isn't it?
Does Messi score a goal on every attempt? Does he score a goal on every third attempt?
To me, "luck" is everything you don't control. You can call it fate, reality, "the grind", or life. The fact is you don't have complete control over most aspects you think you have control over. It is an illusion.
The faith that big things come from little ones is a bigger factor in success than is often acknowledged.
People find academic careers hard for a lot of the same reasons that startups are difficult: there's no clear roadmap for moving forward, tons of hard work is necessary but definitely not sufficient for success, and although you have frustratingly little control over outcomes, it feels like all of your 'eggs' are trapped in one basket.
What is more scary: I exclusively write LaTeX equations in emails, raw to my colleagues. We have all been working with it for so long it is a native language.
Math does funny stuff to your brain.
This is your brain
\this{is your brain on Math}
It took quite some preparation and a shitload of custom \newcommand's, but it was doable, although painful.
Yes, but not for the reasons you think. Typically the advisor and thesis committee simply will not let the student defend (or at least will strongly urge the student not to defend) unless they are extremely confident the student is ready and will pass. A student failing the defense would be embarrassing for everyone, and so the real judging happens well before that. These days the defense is mostly a formality.
Moreover, students are not even admitted to the program unless they show very strong promise of being able to complete it. If you want to look at low success rates, here is one place to see it. Very few students graduating with a BS in any given field (computer science, mathematics, whatever) have any chance whatsoever of getting admitted to a decent PhD program in that field.
Why is it so hard for you to believe that getting a PhD (something you've never done and know nothing about) is hard?
The reason why failing a PhD thesis defense is rare is because your adviser should prevent you from defending until the product is sufficiently strong. Many, many, many more people fail by dropping out of a PhD program during their dissertation than fail by doing a poor defense. Comparing successful thesis defense rates to startup success rates is not valid.
This. Failing a public defense is not like a startup failing, it's more like an IPO failing (as in, stock goes to zero within a short time). You don't do it if you aren't 99.9999% sure it won't fail.
I've seen it happen five or six times (usually it's the same group of professors) at a top-tier research institute.
I've seen a number of things happen during a defence, but not this. The worst was seeing two professors (one of whom was the candidate's supervisor) on the committee argue with each other while the candidate just had to watch. It took a lot of work for the chair to reign them in. I think it was difficult for the chair because they were arguing in German and the chair didn't speak it since he wasn't from the German department (my friend was getting her Ph.D. in German literature).
Yes, I remember those days too. It was easy. It was also nothing like PhD research.
> Failing a PhD thesis during the defence is apparently a 'rare occurrence' in most universities.
In the US, most committees won't even let you schedule a defense unless they are prepared to pass you. What usually happens is the "all but dissertation" (ABD) route where one is writing in perpetuity or leaves the program without finishing.
In any case, why do you feel compelled to justify how much (harder?, richer?) your chosen path has been than a categorically different alternative path which you admittedly have no experience with? Please, at least rise above the level of posting misinformation.
I am not saying one is right or wrong; the pension could "poof" go away with legislation for example. However, I will say there are compromises/choices to be made. I am quite indifferent to the matter as we all choose a path... The difference lies in how much we think we control vs. how much we actually control.
What are the chances that a person doing a startup will leave the startup with 2-4 million dollars? How does it compare with the chances of getting tenure at a university that pays $150000 on average?
Compare this with the impact a successful startup has and it does not quite compare. A successful startup creates new jobs. Novel science that can be applied creates entire industries.
So impact withstanding, a Nobel prize winner is awarded roughly 8 million SEK, which is 941320 U.S. dollars. Now, disregard their monthly salaries, as the time it takes from winning a Nobel Prize varies from an infinity to once or twice and consider the portion of Nobel prize winners compared to the number of scientists and measure that against the number of businesses owners that rake in 941320 dollars a year out of all of the business owners that there are and I'm sure you'd agree that if you are optimising for personal economic gains going the academic route is not the wisest choice.
Also, it is unusual for a dissertation to be outright rejected because of how it reflects on the advisor and committee: the committee is (supposed to be) kept up to date on the student's progress and will recommend against defending if the student is unlikely to pass. Slightly less unusual would be a student being allowed to defend, but then needing to do major revisions to their dissertation for it to be accepted. Keep in mind that at the point one is defending, quite a bit of time and money has been invested in the candidate so there is a good incentive to see the candidate succeed for no other reason. Unsuited students are (ideally) dismissed much earlier, i.e., at admission to candidacy.
One absolutely worries about being scooped on papers, since those are the currency of academia and being scooped usually results in needing to publish your own (now less novel) work in a lesser journal. And as another commenter points out: a professor taking on 10 students with only 1 succeeding, if one defines success as being tenured, isn't that far off from reality.
As an aside, I personally think forming a research group at a university isn't all that different from creating a startup.
You're right in that they weed Ph.D. students out earlier, during their comprehensive exam. How it's done varies from department to department and university to university. My comprehensive was a lengthy oral exam by my committee with two rounds of questions. The first on background and the second on the written thesis proposal I submitted. I went for 3.5 hours straight, basically until the committee wanted lunch.
Equating a research group to a startup isn't a bad analogy. One of the professors in my department basically uses his students to do research for his company. He even makes them sign over the IP rights to him. Other professors have a continuing line of research across a number of students. Even my Ph.D. thesis was the latest in a number of theses on the same topic, each getting progressively more advanced. My thesis basically finished that line, with other related ones opening up as a result.
Nor do you have a 90% chance of failing in your business venture despite you trying your hardest.
Going from the statistic "90% of businesses fail" to "you have a 90% chance of failure when starting a business" is an incorrect deduction. The latter only follows from the former if business success is almost entirely random chance. It isn't. Some people are almost guaranteed to fail because they have no idea what they are doing or what they are getting into[1]. Some business ideas are just bad. On the flip side, some people are really good at running businesses, take the time to understand what is required, wait until they have a realistic idea, and through all that give themselves a very good chance of succeeding.
I wish we, as a community, would stop parroting this abuse of statistics.
[1] I'd wager that this explains the vast majority of restaurant failures.
same goes for any high stress, high risk business, like running a restaurant. if you've worked in one for years, you're more likely to succeed in running one yourself.
there is a running joke in the restaurant business about rich semi-retired professionals opening up a restaurant and failing miserably, because they simply don't realize how much work it is. they think because they're great home cooks and can throw an awesome dinner party, they can all of a sudden run a commercial kitchen and dining room. wrong. very, very wrong.
same goes with startups. most people fail because they don't understand how much work it is, and simply give up.
It's called "scooping". You do have to worry about other academic groups doing that, depending on the area you're working in.
And you may even also have to worry about Google or MSR scooping you.
In fact, I know of one person who had his thesis basically scooped by a large corporate research lab. Not so much his exact ideas, but they out-performed his would-have-been thesis work in every meaningful way in a sufficiently small sub-problem that he had to pivot.
> Your advisor doesn't take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams
I guess that depends on your advisor and program and your field of study. These sorts of attrition rates aren't unheard of in Math, for instance.
> Messing it up doesn't mean you don't have to tell 30 people that they need new jobs.
That is certainly true. But the upside is also significantly bounded.
> Maybe I'm interpreting the GP post wrong, but I take their use of "hard" to mean "unfair and stressful", and your use of "hard" to mean "high quantity and quality of work."
80 hr weeks working on something that the academic community might choose to reject for whatever reason all while making 20k/yr could be described as both...
First, the likelihood of earning a PhD shouldn't be viewed as p(graduate) but as p(graduate | admitted) * p(admitted). Once you factor in the high rejection rate of competitive PhD programs, the success rate drops off pretty sharply. Additionally, the applicant pool tends to self-select toward people who at least believe they are minimally qualified because of the time and expense in completing applications and gathering letters of recommendation.
Second, the random error term is much larger in the hypothetical formula for startup success than it is for PhD success--in fact, it's probably much larger than any variable one can control. A consequence of this is that a unit increase of talent/skill/drive will move the needle further toward success in the PhD world than in the startup world. Comparing successful or unsuccessful individuals across worlds tells you very little.
Third, for all the parroting of the "9 in 10 startups fail" statistic, there seems to be almost no work in connecting its relevance. A startup is not a person. A person may found multiple companies in their lifetime. A person only needs to earn a PhD once to be considered a PhD. I could go on, but I think "apples and oranges" is sufficient.
Sounds like a pretty good description of the academic job market to me.
-A Ph.D. usually often isn't the end point. If your end point is a tenured academic position, your odds are much, much worse than startup success
-About 50% of Ph.D. students don't complete, ever.
-"1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams" seems odd. Most people who succeed in startups succeed precisely in scope of most peoples dreams. There are outliers, sure, but they are exactly that.
-You aren't scared of Google publishing before you - but in some areas you are justifiably scared of other people publishing before you and making your work unpublishable. You may know these people personally.
-Academic work is often best characterized as being unfair and stressful
-The 90%:10% statistic is just that, and you aren't really applying it meaningfully
-Like companies, Ph.D.s aren't fungible
People have had the problem of being beaten to publication by another researcher and having to re-start their PhD.
The big thing that both PhDs and startups have in common is that you have to do a lot of lonely work for years before you know whether you've succeeded.
Doing PhD research is basically a horrible job choice (imo).
They were talking about building a startup right after a PhD.
He made it exclusive. You had to have a .edu address to sign up so the people ON the network were initially only your peer group. You couldn't get in without that .edu address and therefore you WANTED to get in if you couldn't.
This created a steady user base that didn't have to be EVERYBODY (as long as people at your school were on you didn't care) and a natural spam filter as there were controls on access to those email addresses. Once those people graduated from college they got to stay on the site.
Zuckerberg succeeded specifically because of the exclusivity that Facebook grew from during a time where every other service was just a spam mine.
Also, the foresight to launch a platform.
Launching news feed despite howling criticism.
Taking the company public with little investor surplus, taking heat on CNBC for a year until the market caught up to what they were doing.
Not putting ads on the site in numbers that turned off users but Having enough to run profitably from an early era
Great hiring.
Edit: Also, I think most people misunderstand the primary benefit of school-by-school rollout. By the time people without .edu addresses wanted into Facebook it was already successful. Their growth plan was premised that if you can get 50% of the people in a network to use something, the other 50% (or close to it) will pile on. You can't do that everywhere all at once across the country, let alone the world. The cliche goes... How do you eat a whale? Bite by bite.
MySpace was a trainwreck. The default layout was horrendous, and each user had their own themes, many of which were unreadable (I remember having to select text just to read it).
Don't forget that each college's network was segregated from each other's.
You couldn't view the full profiles of people at other schools unless you were friends with them, but by default, you could view the full profiles of everyone else at your school (you could set your profile to friends-only, but most people didn't back then). I know that I didn't care that everyone else on my network could see my home address and my phone number on my profile, because I knew that they were all classmates (or professors, but very few of them were on Facebook). After I graduated and networks became less prominent, I locked down my profile to friends-only.
Groups were restricted to single schools (and Pages didn't exist): this kept group sizes small and made them feel cozier. Pretty much every school had a group for most fandoms, and it was a big deal if you were able to be the person who got to create your school's group for your favorite subject. There were a number of groups that were basically memes; I forgot what they all were, but no real discussion happened in the group, and their only value was to be listed on your profile. They were classified as "Facebook Classics", and what would happen was that the meme would take off at one school, then the members' friends at other schools would notice them on their profiles and create versions at their schools, and so on. Again, there was some prestige in being the first person to spread the meme to your school.
And there were some college-specific things on your profile, too. There were fields for your class schedule, and you had a separate "mailbox" field for colleges that had dorms.
What he did right, was providing something that no other service did.
Then they withdraw to some solitude to recharge.
And none of them were/are phds
Just because some introverts have seen success does not mean that all introverts starting a company will share in the same amount of success. It can, just as being an extrovert can, enable you or inhibit you.
If you like to be alone with your thoughts, and feel 'exhausted' after interacting with people - you're an introvert.
If you like to always be around others, and get 'charged' from it, and don't like being along - you're an extrovert.
Personally - I have no problem being around people, no problem giving public talks - but I prefer solitude and contemplation to being around crowds.
Introverts I think are more direct and less socially attuned than extroverts, who are very high in EI usually. Salespeople know how to handle people and would never yell and scream at anyone - ever - in any situation - they're personality won't allow it - because 'yelling' is burning massive amounts of 'social capital'. It's the opposite of being 'popular'.
As far as 'public speaking' - I think both could be equally good because it's not really a 'social' thing per sey. It's not 'interaction'. Public speaking is interacting with an 'object' - the crowd.
My bet is that introverts are more direct in their demands - possibly being aggressive. An extrovert narcissist will stab you in the back politically without ever doing anything to make them dislike you or burn political points. I find extroverts will avoid direct confrontation as though it's an instinct - again it burns social capital.
I'll also bet 90%+ of HN readers tend introverted. Extroverts would see absolutely no value in commenting/discussing with people with whom they have no relationship.
Introverts are more likely to value 'ideas' - extroverts value 'relationships'.
Depending on what you are hustling - often - people will buy something or not mostly depending on how charismatic or 'likeable' the person hustling it is. 90% of business relationships are based more on the personalities than the underlying mechanics of the deal because most businesses really are commodities of sorts.
How?
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2013/05/bill-gates-how-to-succe...
President Obama is a self proclaimed introvert, as is Warren Buffett.
Essentially, the two riches men in America and the leader of America are self proclaimed introverts.
G+ never gained traction because it was always the nerdier also-ran to Facebook. Everyone was already on Facebook and G+ didn't really offer anything compelling to make people want to switch. It had (has?) somewhat better segregation of your friends but keeping track of all of that is too much hassle for most people and doesn't really buy them much. Trying to decide if only your family would appreciate this witty cartoon or if you can also include your work colleagues is not something people want to do on every post.
Facebook's exclusivity initially showed no plans for letting everyone else in. It was basically, if you do not have this type of email account, you can NEVER join.
It simply takes practice.
Popular kids have been 'honing' their social skills literally since they were 4 years old. They have been paying attention to other people.
Notice how the sociable kids might have done more poorly in class, whereas the introverts maybe did better? The sociable kids are attuned to relationships. While your thoughts were on the math problem, theirs were on 'how xyz is not paying attention to me, and why'.
There are people you can hang out with. If you try to stay 'in the present' and actually practice paying attention to their thoughts and emotional signals, they will like you.
Unless you literally have autism, there's a 100% chance that you can be sociable. Also - take heart with the fact that most people find it difficult to interact with others. Want to know a secret: many extroverts, who are socially attuned, are actually quite nervous among others, always watching what they say, being deliberate with their actions. So don't feel alone. You're in the majority.
If you fail completely, you might be trying things too far out of your confidence zone. A mousy introvert isn't going to morph into a charismatic rockstar within a single leap, no matter how much the introvert might want that to be the case. Odds are, he'll seize up and freeze, in which case the only thing he practices is the act of freezing.
Another friend was terrified of public speaking so started doing stand up comedy, and now helps run one of the regular shows in a pub here.
You have to put in the hours to an extent, it's not just a case of trying a couple of times and giving up. Alcohol helps to a degree, but obviously don't go crazy with it. Probably hanging out with extroverts and taking note of what they do helps as well.
I'm past 30, grew up as a archetype semi-aspie geek kid with little interest in social matters, preferring books to social settings. My preference is to my own company, still, but I'm comfortable in social settings, I'm a fluent communicator and commended for my presentations when I give them out. I'm also blessed or cursed with a complexity that makes me look perpetually 15 years old - and I'm short. Yeah, goodbye professional credibility based on halo-of-appearance. The upside is I can introduce my two kids early in any conversation, thus signaling my actual age and status - which usually results in a sudden episode of massive cognitive dissonance to my amusement.
So, there are handicaps, and, there are social skills. The dynamics underlying social skills can actually be learned from books - but, like any craft, actually acquiring a functioning ability takes practice. For me, I would split matters under "social capability" to three categories: 1. Self-confidence and Dealing with anxiety 2. Individual interactions 3. Group dynamics.
1. Dealing with anxiety and acquiring self-confidence. For me this is first and foremost a physical activity consisting of a) good posture b) calm and friendly air and c) deep breathing for calming the nerves. A corollary to this is the functioning of mirroring in any social setting - you start to behave, as others percieve you to be [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_(psychology)]. So, if you appear first as mousy, people treat you as mousy, making you feel more moysy. If you appear as confident and amicable, people treat you as confident and amicable, and you start to feel more confident and amicable.
I actually had to take a few months of personal trainer lessons to fix my posture and gain some physical fitness (I requested a program consisting of mostly of body weight exercises and I can't recommend them enough).
If you don't have a good physical posture, and don't have at least a minimal exercise routine, these will actually help a ton. I can give some references on materials if anyone likes.
On anxiety and introspection - zen meditation helps. "Sit down and shut up" by Brad Warner was a good, no-nonsense, introduction. No mystical crap.
2. For me the best resources have been interaction with colleagues and friends, Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people" and the courses http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-conversation-work... and http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/negotiating-the-best-.... The last is about self-confidence -as some interactions are confidence plays, it really, really helps a ton to be aware of the rules.
The hardest part for me, still bugging me, but the most important one as well: remembering people's names! This is absolutely the fundamental cornerstone of every interaction.
3. Group dynamics is a bit different. The simplest rule is: do what everyone else is doing. Go sit at the same table. If there is someone you don't know, introduce yourself. Here also comes the "how conversation works" great course into play. There are different kinds of conversations - learn what they are.
One of the secrets of human relationships that I only got recently that the relationships are things that are in peoples head's. There is no "single relationship" - each relationship is composed of the presentation of the interaction in the head of each participant. This means, that although you may feel awkward, the other person might feel the interaction is natural and pleasing. This is where mirroring, and keeping confident pose comes into play. If the interaction goes on for a long time, you start to mirror the other persons view of the relationships. But, there are still two copies of the relationship - in both of your heads.
So, I would suggest, step 1: air of confidence - good posture and smile. Wait for serendiptous things to happen. Make sure you are dressed neatly and so on - this is part of the mirroring dynamic.
Someone might feel "But that's not authentic me" - sorry - you can't change the humankind or basic psychology of those around you, you can only adjust and learn.