
Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path - dn2k
http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2016/09/05/why-building-a-start-up-is-probably-your-most-sensible-career-path/
======
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.

~~~
__mbm__
> Failing at a startup sucks

This. I have a PhD and a failed startup. It felt real bad, and I didn't get
that far with it (9 months before calling it quits). Creating a successful
startup requires significantly more energy and stress than most science jobs,
even for pre-tenure professors.

It requires different skills than science. Few introverts will succeed at
founding a company, for example. Moreover, you have to produce actionable
results quickly, and you have very different success metrics.

I'm one degree of separation from a PhD startup founder that literally killed
himself as his startup imploded, when the company was 5(?) years old. Severe
depression, loss of all semblance of a life... these are standard in the world
of startup founders. The risk that you destroy your life is real.

~~~
pb
Many of the most successful founders are introverts. Mark Zuckerberg, Larry
Page, Bill Gates, none of them are very extroverted, but they've started some
of the most valuable companies in the world.

Of course if you are so introverted that you are unable to make eye contact or
talk to people it will be a problem, but most of us are not that extreme.

~~~
brightball
I hear things like this about Zuckerberg all the time and he did one singular
thing that made Facebook take off more than all of the other social networks
that were out there at the time (Classmates, High School Alumni, My Space,
etc).

He made it exclusive. You had to have a .edu address to sign up so the people
ON the network were initially only your peer group. You couldn't get in
without that .edu address and therefore you WANTED to get in if you couldn't.

This created a steady user base that didn't have to be EVERYBODY (as long as
people at your school were on you didn't care) and a natural spam filter as
there were controls on access to those email addresses. Once those people
graduated from college they got to stay on the site.

Zuckerberg succeeded specifically because of the exclusivity that Facebook
grew from during a time where every other service was just a spam mine.

~~~
hvidgaard
Tell me again how exclusivity helped Google+ take off.

What he did right, was providing something that no other service did.

~~~
brightball
How was Google+ exclusive?

~~~
jandrese
When it first started out you needed an invitation. Gmail had the same thing.
Google does this fairly often to prevent still developing services from being
crushed by an onslaught of signups.

G+ never gained traction because it was always the nerdier also-ran to
Facebook. Everyone was already on Facebook and G+ didn't really offer anything
compelling to make people want to switch. It had (has?) somewhat better
segregation of your friends but keeping track of all of that is too much
hassle for most people and doesn't really buy them much. Trying to decide if
only your family would appreciate this witty cartoon or if you can also
include your work colleagues is not something people want to do on every post.

~~~
brightball
That's not really exclusive though, that's just a beta program.

Facebook's exclusivity initially showed no plans for letting everyone else in.
It was basically, if you do not have this type of email account, you can NEVER
join.

------
biounit
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.

Comparing the two situations I'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're selling something that people
may like, but they don'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.

I do think promoting a "startup" 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.

~~~
monkmartinez
Does a startup have?

Proposals and Stress = Check

low success rates and intense competition = Check

Need for sales = Check

I can't help but think you essentially have the same situation in academia as
one has in a startup, only "it's different." The difference to me is the
illusion of control. One may think that they are in control of the startup vs.
the bureaucracy of government/academia/established business.

I posit that most things that are required by business are, in fact, not under
your control. The illusion of control is there and one may feel that actions
are leading to certain outcomes, but the truth is they have no direct control
of the outcome. "Luck" plays the same role in the bureaucratic or private
enterprise affair... some have it and others don't.

~~~
jedberg
Chance of extremely high returns = Check (not so much in academia)

~~~
monkmartinez
Chance of nice pension and a job for life = Check (not so much for a failed
startup)

I am not saying one is right or wrong; the pension could "poof" go away with
legislation for example. However, I will say there are compromises/choices to
be made. I am quite indifferent to the matter as we all choose a path... The
difference lies in how much we think we control vs. how much we actually
control.

~~~
khuey
Chances of a nice pension and a job for life are pretty low in academia these
days.

~~~
j7ake
A quick back of the envelope calculation of the value of a $150000 salary over
30 years is 2-4 million (depending on what you assume as your interest rate).

What are the chances that a person doing a startup will leave the startup with
2-4 million dollars? How does it compare with the chances of getting tenure at
a university that pays $150000 on average?

------
jondubois
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
times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page
thesis is not hard work either.

~~~
mikebenfield
> 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.

~~~
squeaky-clean
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 on 10 graduate students and encourage
practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams.
Messing it up doesn't mean you don't have to tell 30 people that they need new
jobs.

Maybe I'm interpreting the GP post wrong, but I take their use of "hard" to
mean "unfair and stressful", and your use of "hard" to mean "high quantity and
quality of work."

~~~
vonmoltke
> 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.

~~~
cderwin
Out of pure curiosity, what makes you think that someone on hn is more likely
to be successful running a startup than anyone else?

~~~
beachstartup
because they/we are more likely to have worked at one, and see how it actually
works, or doesn't work.

same goes for any high stress, high risk business, like running a restaurant.
if you've worked in one for years, you're more likely to succeed in running
one yourself.

there is a running joke in the restaurant business about rich semi-retired
professionals opening up a restaurant and failing miserably, because they
simply don't realize how much work it is. they think because they're great
home cooks and can throw an awesome dinner party, they can all of a sudden run
a commercial kitchen and dining room. wrong. very, very wrong.

same goes with startups. most people fail because they don't understand how
much work it is, and simply give up.

~~~
wott
> _because they /we are more likely to have worked at one, and see how it
> actually works, or doesn't work._

They were talking about building a startup right after a PhD.

~~~
beachstartup
and i'm obviously not.

------
sremani
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.

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.

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.

Its not automatic, but I agree with the essence of the article.

edit: I am not a Ph.D.

~~~
sidlls
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?

~~~
throwaway729
_> That "grit" is entirely within an academic context and does not necessarily
translate outside of that context_

Do you have any particular reason for stating this? Having been in both
environments, I actually think that academic grit translates outside of
academia more fluidly than the other way around.

Conjectured reason: most academic projects have a horizon of 5-20 years to
market and require large amounts of very mundane and uninspiring work. There
are infinite distractions within academia. A successful academic project isn't
going to make anyone rich, and even if it does, that person probably won't be
you. Also, the pay is terrible.

Startup and even corporate life are very different in almost all of those
dimensions. Projects succeed or fail fast. There are few distractions,
especially for individual contributors. There's still routine work, but
usually routine in the sure-to-succeed way rather than the sure-to-fail-and-
be-repeated-10x-times way. A successful project can easily make you a valuable
person -- either on the job market or in terms of actual net worth. And even
if everything hits the fan, you're receiving a reasonable salary and building
your career.

 _> It's also debatable whether a PhD absolutely implies an above average IQ _

That is certainly true.

~~~
sidlls
I have nothing other than my personal experience and observations of fellow
degree holders. I mostly agree with respect to the fluidity argument, but I
think that's different from my point. I've seen PhD holders lack the grit to
see a project filled with non-academic tedium through, for example. I've been
there myself, even.

------
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
0.5% getting 'professor' positions is just nonsense. Just click the link so
see some useful discussion, but it's ridiculous at its face: the average
professor is _not_ 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't take
on doctoral students.

Finally, consider that, upon entering a doctoral program, many students don't
intend on academia at all. That number drops by the time they complete their
dissertations, too.

Ultimately, I'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't nearly as ridiculous as
some would claim.

~~~
patall
Might not be in physics or mathematics but in Life Science it certainly almost
is. At the institute I am working right now has about 20 PhD students per full
professor (every 3 years anew, so a Professor has 10 times that number in 30
years). Its all a question of associates and other types of group leaders and
obviously delegation.

------
kayhi
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].

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 'start my own thing' since
I hadn't ever heard of doing a start-up being in the Midwest.

[1] [https://labspend.com/](https://labspend.com/)

~~~
ginger_beer_m
Do you get enough paying customers for your startup? I imagine labs tend to be
hesitant before they approach startups for solutions to their problems..

------
pavel_lishin
... if you'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.

~~~
pc86
Well if you have no interest in remaining and academia and you only compare it
to becoming a professor, _anything_ would be better, right?

~~~
stevenwiles
I'm having trouble understanding your logical association between having no
interest in doing something and being willing to do literally anything else.

Would you mind explaining what you mean by that?

------
hodgesrm
I'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.

* Years of grunt work. You just did that on your Ph.D. Don'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.

* 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.)

* 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.

Finally, if you don't fit the mold there's a reasonable chance you'll either
just flame out nothing to show for it or get fired. That'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.

------
Animats
This is addressed to new PhDs. Look what they're comparing it with:

 _" 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."_

------
carsongross
_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._

Hmmm.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest ulterior motives are in play here.

------
dberg
"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"

Um, yes except for the part about paying for food and shelter ??

~~~
nibs
Cover your costs includes mortgage and food in this context.

------
ianai
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.

~~~
smallnamespace
> 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
said.

~~~
ianai
The telling stuff always happens on the margin ;)

------
dluan
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).

------
gohrt
Putting blogs and "news" on nature.com is continually degrading the quality of
the "Nature" brand. It'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.

------
astazangasta
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.

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
"career" and a "startup" 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.

This is why I will remain stuck in academia forever, desperately seeking that
shrinking universe where someone can attempt to produce pure public goods.

~~~
contingencies
Admirable! This sort of socially conscious personal life decision making
rarely survives very long after contact with capitalist realities... a quote
from Peter Thiel (of whose apparent social perspectives and path-to-riches I
am not a fan, ) summarizes the late capitalist perspective on this: _The
eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast._ May I
ask what your field is?

------
shoyer
> Later stage investment is increasingly focused on science > > Even five
> years ago it was incredibly hard to get funding for science-based
> ventures...

This seems wrong to me.

This may be true for consumer facing products or tech investors like YC, but
it misses that biotech investors have been investing $1B+/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.

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucebooth/2015/07/23/the-
ventur...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucebooth/2015/07/23/the-venture-
funding-boom-in-biotech-a-few-things-its-not)

------
DenisM
Every PhD student should read this book [1] about academic job perspectives.
It's a bit of a cold shower, but it also tells you how to deal with it, if
that's what you really want after all.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Essential-Guide-Turning-
Ph-...](https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Essential-Guide-Turning-
Ph-D/dp/0553419420)

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

~~~
bbcbasic
Err. Why do you need to work 112 hours a week for 10 years?

~~~
sporkologist
To get to the other side.

------
lumberjack
Well sometimes you still need that Ph.D, though.

I recently enquired about a possible career at a small (<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.

BUT! They pretty much only hire Ph.Ds. Why? It's mostly a reputation thing.
When they send you to help out a client they don't want to send somebody who
"only" obtained a masters.

The firm was started by two Ph.Ds out of school and could essentially be
considered a startup. Barely 10 years old I believe.

~~~
dejv
There is distinction between consulting company, new business and startups.

------
kriro
I'm not sure the headline is warranted as natural science career paths that
involve R&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 "veterans". But I could be wrong,
I only see natural scientists' lives from the outside.

But the overall point is interesting. I feel there's a slight bias against
academics from "the startup scene" or maybe I'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'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're more or less forced to get a better
understanding of statistics and rigorous testing (with all the pitfalls
involved) and the general hypothesis/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'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]

------
bluetwo
Screw the statistics.

If you feel compelled to start up a company, I say do it.

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.

Only advice I would give is to get yourself on decent financial footing before
making the leap. It helps you from making impulsive/bad decisions later.

------
LargeCompanies
Can'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.

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.

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.

Overall, great times with many lows that are now great life stories even if
I'm not a millionaire I now earn a good living coding.

------
baristaGeek
"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."

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.

However, this article shouldn'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.

------
ci5er
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.

Yes - they have the smarts. Yes - they know how to learn (but are sometimes
arrogant enough that they won't). Yes - they know how to work hard. But
there's something about the academic culture that makes for ... I don't know.
Something. I haven't nailed it down, and I wouldn't go so far as to claim
"advanced degrees considered harmful", but startups are hard in a different
way than academia prepares one for.

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?

------
bluebeard
Aka science PhD's need jobs because there's not enough research funding to go
around.

------
leroy_masochist
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.

I think "startups require almost the exact same skills as science" 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.

It is also true that there are many people who are exceptionally good
scientists who are not good entrepreneurs (and wouldn't be if they tried), and
vice versa.

------
dxbydt
I agree with the article not because I've drunk the kool-aid but because I
have seen the math work out on numerous occasions.

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.

Your conservative classmate joins a bigcorp and stays there 4 years averaging
$z per year. So he now has 4z.

It's a simple exercise to enumerate tuples (x,y,z) where 3x + y > 4z.

Literally in every case I have seen up close and personal, the LHS exceeded
the RHS. And I'm not going to argue with math.

~~~
nxc18
That equation makes it a little too easy to have a rosy picture of things.

A failed startup can be very expensive. You might break even. You might not.
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.

Then think about the rest of your life. Surely there is some value in getting
enough sleep, having free time, work-life balance (because your work isn't
100% of your life), and a basic level of security. Startup life sucks; there
are far fewer people who have what it takes (including luck) than there are
people who think they do.

------
lsc
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.

On top of that, nobody tells you, but when you go to get a real job after
starting a company? If you didn't have big-name VC, "Oh, that was your
company?" the interviewer asks... but what the interviewer clearly means is
actually "Oh, so you were unemployed"

I mean, I'm not saying that you shouldn't start a company, I'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.

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.

------
known
"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." \--George Bernard Shaw

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Nalta
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'm
hoping my job search will be easier :P

~~~
gautamdivgi
I thought the outlook for a PhD w/ specialization in ML would be bright, no?
At least in industry. The academic world is something I wouldn't even
consider.

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convolvatron
if you succeed, great. if you raise, fail, and decide that it isn't the life
for you - you aren't left with a lot of options.

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

~~~
j7ake
But the 1/20 that do "succeed" get a salary of ~$150000 over ~30 years, which
is worth $2-4 million today dollars depending on how you set your interest
rates.

Are 1 in 20 founders today exiting with $2-4 million in their pockets?

~~~
andkon
No.

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

