Its interesting to me that everyone here seems to have advice to offer, some of it very personally critical, to a man who is merely outlining his own train of thought, not telling anyone to follow his path. I am nearing the end of my fourth year in physics grad school and have never been closer to quitting. My own experience has been very isolating-I work long hours in the basement of a lab, limiting of my personal growth-I've been in a kind of 'stasis' where I'm in this college environment but very clearly do not fit the mold of a college student, and professionally frustrating - not only do I not have the kind of control over my project which people claim as the holy grail of a Ph.D., there is no clear end in sight to what I am doing. The only thing keeping me here is momentum and fear. Here is a man who just took his life off the usual path and spat in the face of fear. That deserves respect.
This has got to make PG nervous. How many people's life is he affecting? :-)
He's definitely had an impact on my priorities in a very big and positive way. I hope everyone who makes changes based on his inspiration and motivation does it with a clear head and can take responsiblity for the decision and outcome.
Couldn't you have taken a sabbatical? I mean, did you just totally walk away from it? I took a sabbatical for a year from a PhD in CS to pursue some medical science ideas, then went back when they didn't go far enough to make a living on. Not flaming, just curious.
At the end of the day this is a public explanation of a private decision. I'm guessing that the amount of thought that went into this decision is massive and began on some level long before PG made a comment. Without personally knowing Andres, I think it's safe to say as a physics expert he possesses the analytical skills required to go into this with a clear head. I for one give him credit for acting on his instincts rather than playing it safe. All the posts below are proving that point. How many people would be claiming that he made a mistake if he continued to pursue Physics and Octopart failed? No one because who can criticize the pursuit of a doctorate? Chances are his dedication to Octopart will lead him in yet another direction, one that most likely would not have reared itself in the basement of the Physics lab.<p>As for the women...well that is a whole other conversation. Andres, I know lots of women now that I'm married, let me know your type.
I often wonder if there are good opportunities for (non-web) startups in physics/science. The state of programming in there is abysmal, in my experience. There must be thousands of Fortran implementations of finite element codes out there, each with dozens of non-trivial bugs. It's absurd that physicists do so much low-level programming and optimization on their own.
David Sternberg writes in his book, "How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation," that the right reason to pursue a doctorate is a deep interest in your discipline, along with the intention to work professionally in it upon completion. I recommend this book to anyone having first or second thoughts about pursuing a Ph.D.<p>
Social isolation helps if your intention is to get work done. In the words of the poet:<p> "Startups must be pursued for their own sake<p> and never to impress potential mates."<p>
I hate to play devils advocate but is dropping out of school a reflection of what is to come when the start up work gets tedious? Please dont get me wrong I believe you should follow your passion and if that takes dropping out of school or climbing Mt. Everest follow Nike and just do it! Maybe dropping out of school shows the investor that you are serious but are you dropping out because you are serious or because youre bored and this offers you a way out? Am I way off on this line of thought? By the way if I was facing the same decision I would drop out too.
It's brave to drop everything you've been working so hard for in sights of opportunity, but is it really in the electronic part search market? Sorry, I don't mean to sound negative, but a PhD in physics would have opened such a large expanse of possibilities. You're going to throw it away for a chance at more women and on the whim of one man (PG's) advice.
Best of luck.
I suspect that startups are for more creative people. So you need to decide whether to pursue an analytical phd or a more creative startup. BTW, you might find this discussion interesting: http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/07/science-and-art-of-computation.html
there are no right or wrong choices. I find this an interesting post as I just commented on the 'involved' vs 'committed' post ~ http://tinyurl.com/2q9ut8 where a co-founder left to pursue a PhD from a startup. The key test is are they *both committed*? I also noted the potential motivators, '... no money, no job, no health insurance, and no idea if we are actually going to succeed ...', '... started counting the number of girls I would interact with on a daily basis ...'. While their situation may/may not improve on all these points the fact they are committed is a step in the right direction. Now if only I could search for AMD64 ~ http://octopart.com/search?q=AMD64
Irrelevant to the rest of the discussion, but just a suggestion: get the domain name octapart.com, too. Lots of people spell octopus wrong. Good luck! Sera