Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

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&#x27;t change that. Failing at a startup sucks, and sucks really hard. But of course, its not in a VC&#x27;s interest to tell you the pain that comes with a startup.<p>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.

Interesting perspective. Certainly get a good feel for your potential before striking out on a startup. And have as much savings as possible. I did the PhD and while doing my Postdoc I started a company. I did many years as Research Professor before quitting and focusing on my company.<p>Comparing the two situations I&#x27;d argue the business option is far better for a number of reasons. The most important being freedom. To survive in academics now is an awful game of proposals and nonstop stress. Success rates are very low and there is intense competition. And all for very little (no) payoff. And it is a sales job. At the end, before I finally pulled the plug I often likened academics to a situation where you&#x27;re selling something that people may like, but they don&#x27;t want to pay for it. If you do it right with a company, people are begging to pay you. And the reality is the business route is much more challenging, just in a different way. Everything is on the line.<p>I do think promoting a &quot;startup&quot; in the conventional sense where you have VC funding and explosive growth is disingenuous. There are many opportunities where a PhD scientist can carve out a niche where you have a company with 1-10 million in revenue. It affords an excellent situation that, if sustainable, is orders of magnitude better than the academic lifestyle that is so often idolized.

I didn&#x27;t go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn&#x27;t recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone).<p>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.<p>My idea of &#x27;hard work&#x27; has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.

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.<p>A Ph.D means you have higher than average IQ and you have grit, honestly, without will-power no body completes Ph.D. which have great correlation of success.<p>You can learn marketing (which is very important), improve you EQ with seminars but Depth of Ph.D. and grit to the finish line is not easy to get.<p>Its not automatic, but I agree with the essence of the article.<p>edit: I am not a Ph.D.

0.5% getting &#x27;professor&#x27; positions is just nonsense. Just click the link so see some useful discussion, but it&#x27;s ridiculous at its face: the average professor is <i>not</i> 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&#x27;t take on doctoral students.<p>Finally, consider that, upon entering a doctoral program, many students don&#x27;t intend on academia at all. That number drops by the time they complete their dissertations, too.<p>Ultimately, I&#x27;d give a rough figure of 1 in 4 qualified and motivated PhDs getting a suitable tenure-track position in a reasonable timeframe (~4-5 years). Maybe one in five or six will get tenure, in the end. Which is still terrible when you think about it, but the odds aren&#x27;t nearly as ridiculous as some would claim.

I completed a PhD in chemistry and went straight into the start up world in 2008. I focused on building tools that would have been helpful in my research lab[1].<p>My feeling was I can work a lot of hours for little pay and questionable benefits as a post doc or start my own thing. I use &#x27;start my own thing&#x27; since I hadn&#x27;t ever heard of doing a start-up being in the Midwest.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;labspend.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;labspend.com&#x2F;</a>

... if you&#x27;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.

I&#x27;m a huge start-up fan but this article makes doing a start-up sound more fun than they actually are on the ground. Here are a few things the article leaves out.<p>* Years of grunt work. You just did that on your Ph.D. Don&#x27;t kid yourself, start-ups are just as hard and can take longer before they are successful. As they say in show biz, it takes years to become an overnight success.<p>* Business smarts are non-optional. If you are in a leadership position you need good business acumen. (I.e. like Andy Grove, not like Bill Shockley.)<p>* You need to be an all-rounder who can roll with the punches and pitch in to do whatever needs to be done. Chances are only some of that will be science and some fraction will be downright unpleasant. My personal favorite: the head honcho in a small company is the top of the product support escalation chain. By the time users get on the phone with you they are often downright steamed.<p>Finally, if you don&#x27;t fit the mold there&#x27;s a reasonable chance you&#x27;ll either just flame out nothing to show for it or get fired. That&#x27;s in addition to all the normal stuff that goes wrong when you have a good idea, good funding, good co-founders, etc. Doing a startup is not for everyone.

This is addressed to new PhDs. Look what they&#x27;re comparing it with:<p><i>&quot;According to the Start-up Genome Report 92% of high-tech start-ups fail. ... If you can get as far as investment this number falls to around 40%, and your chance of making it big within that sits at around 10% (Pitchbook). This adds up to a 0.48% success rate overall. Interestingly, this is the same proportion of PhD students that reach professorship.&quot;</i>

<i>Dr Mark Hammond is one of the founders of Deep Science Ventures, a fully funded six-month programme designed to turn scientists in to founders.</i><p>Hmmm.<p>I&#x27;m going to go out on a limb and suggest ulterior motives are in play here.

&quot;That clearly sounds dismal, but it doesn’t matter – as long as you can cover your costs while you try then your upside is nearly unlimited, whilst your downside is virtually non-existent&quot;<p>Um, yes except for the part about paying for food and shelter ??

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.

Seems like the author has a motivation to push this kind of storyline, that startups are sexy for scientists. Yet another early-stage fund with tons of investments and none that are notable successes (yet).

Putting blogs and &quot;news&quot; on nature.com is continually degrading the quality of the &quot;Nature&quot; brand. It&#x27;s poor form to mix this editorial and un-reviewed journalistic content under the same banner as peer-reviewed scientific articles of the Nature journal.

I deplore the model of the world where acquiring a PhD is a choice made by an individual, and what you should do is cash in on your credentials.<p>When we ignore the social component of our lives, big surprise, it atrophies and dies. I have a PhD because many people (a society) invested in me to get one. My PhD is not something I should use for my own enrichment by building a &quot;career&quot; and a &quot;startup&quot; to satisfy my job requirements, there should be a substantial portion of my effort that is socially directed, that gives back the enormous amount that was given to me to get me here.<p>This is why I will remain stuck in academia forever, desperately seeking that shrinking universe where someone can attempt to produce pure public goods.

&gt; Later stage investment is increasingly focused on science &gt; &gt; Even five years ago it was incredibly hard to get funding for science-based ventures...<p>This seems wrong to me.<p>This may be true for consumer facing products or tech investors like YC, but it misses that biotech investors have been investing $1B+&#x2F;quarter into science based startups for over a decade now [1]. I suspect that as far as absolute numbers go traditional biotech investing still dominates in this space.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;brucebooth&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;the-venture-funding-boom-in-biotech-a-few-things-its-not" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;brucebooth&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;the-ventur...</a>

Every PhD student should read this book [1] about academic job perspectives. It&#x27;s a bit of a cold shower, but it also tells you how to deal with it, if that&#x27;s what you really want after all.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Professor-Essential-Guide-Turning-Ph-D&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0553419420" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Professor-Essential-Guide-Turning-Ph-...</a>

Why work 40 hours a week for someone else and sleep at night, when you can work 16 hours&#x2F;day 7 days a week for 10 years for yourself, and age a lot in the process?

Well sometimes you still need that Ph.D, though.<p>I recently enquired about a possible career at a small (&lt;50 people) consulting firm. They do mathematical modelling and consulting and have scored a few high profile contracts. The work is interesting, easier than the typical Ph.D stuff and yet still challenging and varies a lot.<p>BUT! They pretty much only hire Ph.Ds. Why? It&#x27;s mostly a reputation thing. When they send you to help out a client they don&#x27;t want to send somebody who &quot;only&quot; obtained a masters.<p>The firm was started by two Ph.Ds out of school and could essentially be considered a startup. Barely 10 years old I believe.

I&#x27;m not sure the headline is warranted as natural science career paths that involve R&amp;D departments of established companies are a very good choice (as is academia in these fields). Taking slow and steady wins is actually a good choice in these fields (imo) as is access to &quot;veterans&quot;. But I could be wrong, I only see natural scientists&#x27; lives from the outside.<p>But the overall point is interesting. I feel there&#x27;s a slight bias against academics from &quot;the startup scene&quot; or maybe I&#x27;m just imagining it being a mediocre scientist thinking about starting by own business every now and then (so not the super duper elite MIT guy). I&#x27;ve always felt that some of the stuff you learn by practicing science is fairly valuable even in a web based startup. Depending on the field you&#x27;re more or less forced to get a better understanding of statistics and rigorous testing (with all the pitfalls involved) and the general hypothesis&#x2F;test-it cycle is really helpful for startup life as well. For me the sad trade of is that my programming skills (mostly the secondary skills like architecture, being up to date on databases, refining the vcs workflow, testing etc.) erode slowly. I also have a lot less time for side projects these days which kind of sucks. [I haven&#x27;t taken the traditional academia career path and actually worked at a software company before so I feel like I have a decent grasp on both fields]

Screw the statistics.<p>If you feel compelled to start up a company, I say do it.<p>Put yourself 100% in. You might be 100% successful, or, you might be 100% a failure. But do not think the statistics make you one or the other.<p>Only advice I would give is to get yourself on decent financial footing before making the leap. It helps you from making impulsive&#x2F;bad decisions later.

Can&#x27;t agree more! If you are not a skilled developer or designer yet have a major passion about seeing your app ideas built go for it and learn those skills along the way.<p>Your startup journeys could succeed but the odds are against you. Though, whatever its a ton of fun and the stories that come from it make you a more interesting candidate when going up for your first Developer job.<p>I had two startups fail yet I was able to raise incubator money for both, invited and had a demo meeting with Google, invited and filmed for a reality tv show about makers(I think I maybe a good marketer hence these opportunities yet I suck at people skills) and a lot of other random out of nowhere stuff.<p>Overall, great times with many lows that are now great life stories even if I&#x27;m not a millionaire I now earn a good living coding.

&quot;Now, the most successful investors are increasingly coming to the realisation that searching for the low hanging fruit in web-tech is nearing the point of diminishing returns.&quot;<p>This is true in the sense that the amount of VC poured into things such as social networks or SoLoMo startups is decreasing and the amount of VC poured into things such as machine-learning based startups is increasing. Even though the amount poured into the first is still larger than the amount poured into the second.<p>However, this article shouldn&#x27;t discourage people with just an undergrad (or even without an undergrad) to start startups. A group of 22 year olds might know about Deep Learning and might just apply it as a medium to a solution in a different narrow domain than a group of 40 year olds will.

This is interesting. Some of the worst-run startups and companies I know were started and run by one or more academics. You see this quite a bit in pharma-tech and bio-tech.<p>Yes - they have the smarts. Yes - they know how to learn (but are sometimes arrogant enough that they won&#x27;t). Yes - they know how to work hard. But there&#x27;s something about the academic culture that makes for ... I don&#x27;t know. Something. I haven&#x27;t nailed it down, and I wouldn&#x27;t go so far as to claim &quot;advanced degrees considered harmful&quot;, but startups are hard in a different way than academia prepares one for.<p>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?

Aka science PhD&#x27;s need jobs because there&#x27;s not enough research funding to go around.

This strikes me as an oddly process-based approach to a problem (how to start a successful company) that is never solved by following a set process.<p>I think &quot;startups require almost the exact same skills as science&quot; 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.<p>It is also true that there are many people who are exceptionally good scientists who are not good entrepreneurs (and wouldn&#x27;t be if they tried), and vice versa.

I agree with the article not because I&#x27;ve drunk the kool-aid but because I have seen the math work out on numerous occasions.<p>Say you average $x per year for 3 years, then your startup fails, so you join bigcorp at $y. So at the end of 4 years you have 3x+y.<p>Your conservative classmate joins a bigcorp and stays there 4 years averaging $z per year. So he now has 4z.<p>It&#x27;s a simple exercise to enumerate tuples (x,y,z) where 3x + y &gt; 4z.<p>Literally in every case I have seen up close and personal, the LHS exceeded the RHS. And I&#x27;m not going to argue with math.

eh, I am in infrastructure, not science, but looking back, I have a really hard time coming up with something that I might have done (I mean, something that the person I was in my 20s would likely have done.) that could have caused me more financial damage than starting a company did.<p>On top of that, nobody tells you, but when you go to get a real job after starting a company? If you didn&#x27;t have big-name VC, &quot;Oh, that was your company?&quot; the interviewer asks... but what the interviewer clearly means is actually &quot;Oh, so you were unemployed&quot;<p>I mean, I&#x27;m not saying that you shouldn&#x27;t start a company, I&#x27;m just saying that you need to be mindful of the risks. Yes, you feel free when you are young, but any money you put into retirement then is extremely impactful. The same is true of anything you put into covering your long-term housing short.<p>Even if I could talk to myself in my early 20s, I probably could not talk him out of starting a company, but... i would be way better off now if he could have been talked into being more conservative... into maxing out all available tax-deferred retirement options, into limiting the amount of money and the amount of my self that I was willing to sink into the thing. Into buying a fucking condo, at least. Something.

&quot;The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.&quot; --George Bernard Shaw

As a Ph.D. student, I found this to be an interesting outlook, albeit a bleak look at the current job market. My research is in machine learning, and I&#x27;m hoping my job search will be easier :P

if you succeed, great. if you raise, fail, and decide that it isn&#x27;t the life for you - you aren&#x27;t left with a lot of options.

TLDR: start a startup if you are in such a terrible job market that you have, by default, a 95% chance of failure.

Glug glug glug. The sound of Koolaid being drunk..