131–140 of 191 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same way all skills are acquired: practice.
Practicing does not help for me. I am rather a lone wolf, but not because I want to be, but because I simply fail completely, so I find it a little bit unfair to downvote the above post.
... if you've just gotten your Ph.D., know how to get some specific grants, have no interest in remaining in academia, and consider it against only one alternative: becoming a professor.
Well if you have no interest in remaining and academia and you only compare it to becoming a professor, anything would be better, right?
Would you mind explaining what you mean by that?
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.
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Many of the most successful founders are introverts. Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates, none of them are very extroverted, but they've started some of the most valuable companies in the world. 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.
This eventually became a liability for Mark Zuckerberg; some of his earliest TV interviews went really, really badly. IIRC, Zuck hired a public speaking instructor, had Jesse Eisenberg open various internal and external speaking events for him (such as the keynote for F8 around this time), started having lunches with employees to practice talking to them in Chinese, etc.
I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone). 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 tim…
Going through a graduate program, especially in the sciences, can really prepare you with a lot of the soft skills (and even more of the 'hard' skills) necessary to do so. >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.
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?
0.5% getting 'professor' positions is just nonsense. Just click the link so see some useful discussion, but it's ridiculous at its face: the average professor is not graduating 200 PhD students. The figure is probably closer to 20 for most fields, which gives a more reasonable 5%. Then you have to consider that many programs offer tenured research positions, but don't take on doctoral students. Finally, consider that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of the most successful founders are introverts. Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates, none of them are very extroverted, but they've started some of the most valuable companies in the world. 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.
I hear things like this about Zuckerberg all the time and he did one singular thing that made Facebook take off more than all of the other social networks that were out there at the time (Classmates, High School Alumni, My Space, etc). 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 ther…
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.
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I don't disagree with you completely, but as a guy working for a start-up I would say that no matter if we find success or failure I'm going to personally walk away with good memories and a hell of an experience. There's more to it than success.
So if you were faced with a nice fat exit, or could continue running the company with the day to day grind, would you continue to pick the journey over the destination?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same way all skills are acquired: practice.
Practicing does not help for me. I am rather a lone wolf, but not because I want to be, but because I simply fail completely, so I find it a little bit unfair to downvote the above post.
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.