Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path • Hacker News Board

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#21

Post by sidlls » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:21 PM UTC

sremani wrote: post #6

I really do not understand the cynical posts here, but given the path for Ph.D.s trying to get tenure is getting more difficult. Deep Science ventures are providing a path ahead. I understand the writer is vested in his venture. I was watching the ultra-endurance documentary the one in Tennesse, he was telling its usually people with Masters or PhDs who excel at this because they are used to planning and preparation.…

That "grit" is entirely within an academic context and does not necessarily translate outside of that context. It's also debatable whether a PhD absolutely implies an above average IQ (or even whether that is a meaningful trait).

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?

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#22

Post by mordocai » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

sremani wrote: post #6

I really do not understand the cynical posts here, but given the path for Ph.D.s trying to get tenure is getting more difficult. Deep Science ventures are providing a path ahead. I understand the writer is vested in his venture. I was watching the ultra-endurance documentary the one in Tennesse, he was telling its usually people with Masters or PhDs who excel at this because they are used to planning and preparation.…

As another not a Ph.D. i'm not convinced from what I know about Ph.D's that a higher than average IQ is actually required.

However, I do agree that "grit"/"will-power" is definitely required.

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#23

Post by santiagobasulto » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #13

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…

This is odd. I was checking socketcluster.io a few hours ago for a side project I'm planning on building. Now I see your comment and Googled you ("because you said 'my first startup', no stalker) and found out you're the main contributor of it. Crazy.

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#24

Post by ianai » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

smallnamespace wrote: post #19

ianai wrote: post #14

Usually a bubble is just about to burst when the last hold out becomes convinced and buys into the hype. The enthusiasm stems from a belief that it will always continue and apply to everyone. Then destruction and chaos.

> last hold out becomes convinced and buys into the hype 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 sa…

The telling stuff always happens on the margin ;)

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#25

Post by notahacker » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:24 PM UTC

sremani wrote: post #6

I really do not understand the cynical posts here, but given the path for Ph.D.s trying to get tenure is getting more difficult. Deep Science ventures are providing a path ahead. I understand the writer is vested in his venture. I was watching the ultra-endurance documentary the one in Tennesse, he was telling its usually people with Masters or PhDs who excel at this because they are used to planning and preparation.…

The alternative to getting on the tenure track is usually getting a commercial role, probably a relatively well paid one. There is literally no worse reason to start a startup than "trying to get tenure is getting more difficult". Because if your end goal is to study phenomenon that particularly fascinate you at your own pace in a collegiate environment, then starting a startup is a big step in the opposite direction. And if it's the difficulty or possibility of failure that's putting you off pursuing a career in academia...

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

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#26

Post by pyromine » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:24 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #16

jondubois wrote: post #13

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…

> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either Except if you stubbornly decide to fully understand LaTeX in the process.

Dear lord, I've started writing all of my mathematics homework in LaTeX, it's not even remotely reasonable.

Though interestingly, having to be more deliberate in my operations do make me have a much more rigorous understanding of what I'm doing.

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#27

Post by lukeqsee » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #13

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…

> My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then.

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.

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#28

Post by marmaduke » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #13

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…

If you've not written a PhD thesis, you're not in a position to discount the work involved. Mine was a hundred pages, and I had about two weeks to write it from scratch. I'm not saying it was hard work, but it's not easy either.

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#29

Post by triplepoint217 » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #13

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…

Writing the 100 page thesis is not the hard work part of a PhD. Doing the research to have the results to write that thesis is the hard work. Unless you are uncommonly lucky, you will fail at some avenues of research and have to slog through lots of painstaking work. I don't (yet) know how that compares to the challenges of a startup, but a PhD is an entirely different animal than an undergrad degree (for better or worse)

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#30

Post by mikebenfield » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 6:27 PM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #13

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…

> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.

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.