Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path
PhD’s tend to be very deferential to authority, they believe in ‘true outcomes’ (i.e. Odds are, he’ll seize up and freeze, in which case the only thing he practices is the act of freezing. Just look at the Yo app. 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.
Um, yes except for the part about paying for food and shelter ? A person only needs to earn a PhD once to be considered a PhD. It’s a simple exercise to enumerate tuples (x,y,z) where 3x + y > 4z. That said, definitely keep my gpa off my resume.
An extrovert narcissist will stab you in the back politically without ever doing anything to make them dislike you or burn political points. I got through uni by doing this at a top 5 research university (Columbia), it may depend on degree but it’s definitely doable at ‘hard uni’s. 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. Nope, research groups/projects at uni is all about milking money from grants.
Even a lot of the ‘shy’ type CEO’s, I think, are still inner hustlers. I was just considering this last night, since I was back on my university campus again. Sometimes it wasn’t because it was hard, but because it was a really bad idea, or the founder(s) really lacked talent. Counterpoint of sorts, taking German PhD programs as an example… You usually have to work on it for 3–6 years (many professors assume you’ll use the full 6 years or it can’t be interesting enough research), often times only being on 50% contracts making about 1k/month after taxes.
So, there are handicaps, and, there are social skills. 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. Yes — they have the smarts. 1) A PhD is a very personal experience, but hard work is the common denominator.
Then think about the rest of your life. 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). 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. Your startup journeys could succeed but the odds are against you.
From what I’ve seen on HN, many commenters are experts on what won’t work. Hard work is valuable when applied to intrinsically valuable work, which will be valuable if you finish it today or tomorrow. 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. You can call it fate, reality, “the grind”, or life.
Or the social and economic safety net. I thought the outlook for a PhD w/ specialization in ML would be bright, no? Your example about hard work is excellent. He even makes them sign over the IP rights to him.
For most startups (depending on the country) it’s fairly healthy for your career even if you fail. But I worked in a forensic genetics laboratory with 2 Ph.D candidates from start to finish and learned to mimic their work ethic and methods: They do not sleep. To me, “luck” is everything you don’t control. First, the likelihood of earning a PhD shouldn’t be viewed as p(graduate) but as p(graduate | admitted) * p(admitted).
Go sit at the same table. Which is still terrible when you think about it, but the odds aren’t nearly as ridiculous as some would claim. These days the defense is mostly a formality. Might not be in physics or mathematics but in Life Science it certainly almost is.
Finally, consider that, upon entering a doctoral program, many students don’t intend on academia at all. 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. The academic world is something I wouldn’t even consider. I agree with you, even though I haven’t graduated until December.
Starting a startup just extends and amplifies that, which can be dangerous. 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. And you may even also have to worry about Google or MSR scooping you. There are people you can hang out with.
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