Ask HN: Research vs. Founding a Tech Startup?

3 points by misterballer 42 days ago | 3 comments

Engineering + math graduate whose goal is to maximize impact. I am currently deciding between two career paths, but have been struggling a lot to determine which would be more impactful:

1. Become a professor/researcher in robotics, working on mainstream technical problems such as zero-shot learning. (To be clear, I’m not primarily thinking about robotics safety or AI safety, but rather general robotics capabilities research.)

2. Try to found “low-sophistication” hard-tech startups — i.e. products that are not extremely technically sophisticated and could easily be prototyped in a local makerspace, meaning any wannabe hard-tech founder could easily make it.

Note: For personal and practical reasons, it is unlikely that I would found a highly sophisticated hard-tech company, i.e. one that requires advanced fabrication / other specialized technologies.

TLDR: Has anyone here faced or thought seriously about a similar decision? If so, how did you decide where you had more counterfactual impact?

I’m currently leaning toward startups because the academic robotics work I’m interested in seems both popular and capacity-constrained. If I pursued it, I would probably be taking a spot that another strong researcher would otherwise fill, limiting my marginal impact. Thus, my impact as a researcher would be close to zero, while at a startup, I could at least potentially have some impact.

A_D_E_P_T 42 days ago |

IMO being a researcher makes sense iff (1) there are unsolved technical or scientific problems that are of personal interest to you, which is to say that you puzzle over them in your spare time, and (2) you can't possibly solve them without access to university/government resources.

If such a matter exists for you, you might make a very good academic or government lab (e.g. LLNL, Sandia, etc.) researcher. You might make an impact, and it would be worth trying.

If not -- if you're doing it for status, safety, or simply to go through the motions -- it's a damned terrible career, indeed a sort of trap, and you're much better off with your option #2. (In which case, by the way, you can still work on scientific and technical problems in your spare time.)

misterballer 42 days ago | |

I agree that the conditions you listed are necessary for being a successful researcher. However, even if somebody were to meet those crtieria, it seems like they would still have little to no impact, since robotics capabilities research is such a popular and capacity-constrained field.

I.e. if I became a researcher at Deepmind / other labs, I would probably be taking a spot that another strong researcher would otherwise fill, limiting my marginal impact. Thus, my impact as a researcher would be close to zero, while at a startup, I could at least potentially have some impact.

Do you generally agree with this assessment?

A_D_E_P_T 42 days ago | | |

It seems to me that it doesn't really work that way. You're not a cog, and robotics capabilities research is hugely multidisciplinary, so you should be able to synthesize unique insights of your own. There are always, always open problems and issues that nobody else is looking at, even in crowded fields.

Besides, as a noob researcher, you'd mostly be doing somebody else's grunt work, at least for a while. Learning the ropes. Then, if you survive, you'd be able to devote substantial time to projects of personal interest -- and those might be high-impact, or at least appear that way to you.