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Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

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

#51

Post by _RPM »

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…

I agree with you, even though I haven't graduated until December. I did 3 internships throughout college, and it really taught me a lot about life. Before that, I too, had a distorted view of life. Working in the real world really opened up my views on life in generally. Your example about hard work is excellent.

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.

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

#52

Post by marmaduke »

jessaustin wrote: post #47
marmaduke wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This raises more questions than it answers. Why did you have such a compressed schedule?

Doctoral school refused theses which were simply concatenation of publications and I was also obliged to start postdoc on deadline.. not great but whatever.

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

#53

Post by vonmoltke »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #48
mikebenfield wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, conductin…

I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take…

> But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest.

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.

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

#54

Post by matrix »

While the author does quote the very low odds of success, I think he does readers a disservice by minimizing that risk. Very few people have the right disposition, the right partners, the right idea, and the right skill set to launch a startup. Being a freshly minted PhD doesn't change that. Failing at a startup sucks, and sucks really hard. But of course, its not in a VC's interest to tell you the pain that comes with a startup.

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.

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

#55

Post by ramblenode »

jondubois wrote: post #32
triplepoint217 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I worked on some pretty big projects and did a lot of research. That was easy. 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 fai…

> I worked on some pretty big projects and did a lot of research. That was easy.

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.

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

#56

Post by ska »

squidfood wrote: post #50
squeaky-clean wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take…

> take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams. Sounds like a pretty good description of the academic job market to me.

9:1 is too optimistic though

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

#57

Post by etendue »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #48
mikebenfield wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, conductin…

I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take…

The attrition rate for a PhD program isn't 90%, but 50% is not unknown; my own was around 30% (measured from matriculation to defense, my class year). Some students were forced out of the program, others left on their own accord.

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.

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

#58

Post by pjc50 »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #48
mikebenfield wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, conductin…

I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take…

> You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it.

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.

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

#59

Post by ska »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #48
mikebenfield wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, conductin…

I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take…

I think you are mischaracterizing both startups and academic work. A few things to think about:

-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

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

#60

Post by semi-extrinsic »

gbrown wrote: post #38
jondubois wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on some pretty big projects and did a lot of research. That was easy. 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 fai…

You do not have the experience or expertise to justify your claims; a PhD thesis is in no way like doing a regular research project, or passing a course in university. 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 fa…

> 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.

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.

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