
Ask HN: Ph.D. vs Startup skillset - njoubert
Hello HN!<p>What, if any, is the correlation between the skillset needed to be successful at a Ph.D. and start a successful company? Does a Ph.D. prepare you for founding a startup? Which skills are similar, which are not?<p>My initial hunch is that the self-motivation needed for a Ph.D. is also what startup founders need to succeed, and that launching a startup out of your Ph.D. is one of the better ways of getting a company off the ground.<p>To give some context, I'm a current Ph.D. admit, and I'm one of the lucky few that gets to choose between Stanford, Berkeley (my current school), CMU and UW. I'm focused on Graphics, but I'm confident that I'd like to be involved in startups after my Ph.D. So I'm trying to decide which of these schools to go to, and whether my intuition about Ph.Ds and Startups are shared by others.
======
russell
A PhD is a great backup if you eventually want to go back into the mainstream.
I find it fascinating that hugely successful companies were founded by
dropouts: Microsoft, Apple (I think), and Google

Caustic Graphics was founded by my son, a Berkeley dropout and two of his
buddies, one of whom never went to college. The product is coming out this
month.

My cynical advice is to accept the Stanford offer. Instant cred in the VC
community. Spend a year working on your startup and making contacts, then drop
out. Guaranteed success. :-)

------
pg
Finishing what you start. Enduring pain. Technical ability.

~~~
jey
" _Finishing what you start._ "

Is that really an intrinsically virtuous trait? I think it would be better
stated as: Stick with it as long as the expected utility outweighs the
opportunity costs, and don't let temporary challenges and random emotional
swings affect your estimate of the expected utility.

~~~
pg
I wasn't claiming it's intrinsically virtuous, just that it's also something
you need in a startup.

------
jfarmer
There are a few ways a PhD can help:

1\. If your PhD research is directly applicable to a product you think is
worth building. See, e.g., Google.

2\. If you need to hire other PhDs or people with advanced degrees. Having a
PhD gives you street cred which helps you build a team.

Beyond that starting a company is about talking to customers, prototyping
ideas and products, and building a team. Along the way you might also have to
convince other people to give you money to keep you going towards your
ultimate, billion-dollar goal.

~~~
jfarmer
BTW, I'd definitely choose Stanford if your goal is to start a company. It's
one school where the line between academia and business is very blurry --
people pass back and forth much more freely than at other schools.

This means you'll have access to a whole network of people with the same
interests or experiences directly applicable to your situation.

------
jlees
The self-motivation you need to focus on one thing, working in near-isolation
for months at a time, is certainly handy. Though I've found the startup side
of things to be very unlike the single-target focus of a PhD; there's just too
much going on in many different areas. (I prefer it like that.)

Learning to live on a PhD stipend or whatever the hell it is in the USA is
also pretty useful when you decide to start a business and have no money.

Plus having specialist knowledge that applies itself to a business case is
obviously a great advantage, as you can launch a startup out of more than just
an idea; you can launch it out of _research_ , most importantly _research your
competitors don't have_. Be warned, though. If you find your PhD topic
drifting towards the Real World(TM), your supervisor might try to yank you
back to their specific obscure out-of-date minority application of it, and you
might end up with a battle on your hands.

Not that I'm bitter. I quit.

------
scott_s
I think being a professor trying to get tenure is more similar to founding a
startup than getting the Ph.D. itself.

Professors trying to get tenure have to produce good research which results in
a high quantity of high quality publications, attract and advise graduate
students and chase grant money. In the beginning, professors will do most of
the research themself, but as their group grows, their students mature as
researchers and they have a steady flow of grant money, they're more like
managers.

Also, I think stating what you'd like to do after you get your Ph.D. is like
the caterpillar stating what kind of butterfly it wants to be. The process
will change you in ways you can't predict, and you may want different things.

From someone who can see the end, good luck with your beginning.

------
10ren
I think there are strong parallels between PhD research and invention (though
most startups these days don't have that basis). A patent requires researching
prior art (literature) and describing your idea formally (papers/thesis). A
PhD must be original and substantial (novel and non-obvious). In both cases,
you are need to obtain your examiner's approval. :-)

In other words, formally describing a new abstract idea in the context of what
has gone before is common to both - but actually creating a working
technology, that people want, is different from a PhD.

That said, the beginning part of a PhD is _great fun_.

------
apu
As someone doing both (well, not sure about the 'successful' part yet =)), I
definitely see a lot of parallels in PhD work and startup work, and a
correspondingly large amount of overlap between the skills needed to be
successful at either.

First there are the 'obvious' primary benefits of doing the PhD: technical
skills & knowledge, ability to think about new & important questions, working
hard, powering through obstacles of different types, deep focus on a single
(perhaps moving) target.

Second there are the less-obvious primary benefits (things that many people
don't realize, or that might not apply to everyone). For example, programming
skills:

\- extreme flexibility: requirements change all the time since you usually
don't know what the goal is (or exactly how to get there)

\- development speed: a lot of research work (esp. in graphics, which I sort-
of work in) requires many many iterations, and the faster you can code each
iteration, the faster you can find the true solution

\- efficiency: in vision and graphics, you're always dealing with huge amounts
of data and processing power is never enough; this forces you to write
decently efficient code right from the beginning

Another less-obvious benefit is communication skills. Once you start
publishing papers, you'll learn to become adept at many types of
communication:

\- Writing: Technical papers need to be written well to be accepted. This
means simplicity and clarity. Conference papers are severely length-
restricted, so you have to learn to get to the essence of a concept quickly
and clearly.

\- Polishing: Especially at graphics conferences like SIGGRAPH, submissions
have to highly polished. This means taking care to get lots of "minor" details
right and making everything look very professional, so that it gets accepted.
This mirrors the kind of polishing you have to do in startups to make sure
customers will want to use your product.

\- "Selling": Sometimes viewed as a "dirty word" in academia, there is
nevertheless a large component of "selling" required to become really
successful in academia (unless you're a super-genius, which you'll quickly
find most people are not). This means presenting yourself and your ideas well,
making sure to emphasize your contributions and differentiating from
"competitors" (previous work). The parallels to startups are obvious.

\- Speaking: Presentations at conferences are a big deal -- your chance to
make your work widely known and to make a strong impression about yourself to
the top people in the field -- people who might one day be your
interviewers/bosses/collaborators. The clarity and focus required for good
writing is a must here as well.

Third, there are the secondary benefits which many people have already pointed
out: "street cred", backup plan, academic "union card", etc.

Being a PhD startup founder, I find that you can tilt the scales in your favor
by taking advantage of your domain knowledge. Lots of sufficiently motivated
and hard-working people can create successful startups in areas which don't
require advanced knowledge, but the field of competitors narrows considerably
in areas which are highly technical.

Finally, I'd like to congratulate you on your admission to those PhD programs.
They're all great, and I know some people at all of them. Startup-wise,
Stanford is probably your best bet, although I know CMU & UW also have had
startups in vision/graphics, so it probably won't matter too much. Anyways,
best of luck with whatever you choose, and certainly keep your options open --
you never know what direction your interests will take!

------
skmurphy
Many technical PhD's tend to want to "win the argument" instead of closing the
sale. If you want to start a company do it now and skip the PhD.

------
fgimenez
How'd the brutesoft presentation go?

~~~
njoubert
pretty well! I had some good questions on security and the like. We need to
get brutesoft.com live!

------
friendstock
go to stanford.. meet a lot of people.

