Ask HN: Is pursuing a PhD worth it vs. starting/working for a startup? - ahmedbaracat
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berpasan
Both seem so different, what are your goals?

If you want to be a teacher or hold a research or Engineering position at a
more research driven corporation, and get a confortable life and safe career,
get a PhD.

If you want to work your ass off for +10 years at least, life a insecure and
stressed out life, have 0,1% chance of being insanely sucessful, rich and
change the world, do a Startup.

Doing a startup trying to achieve only "career recognition" or improve your
resume so you can land a job at Google or Microsoft is a total waste of time.
You'll likely fail, lose your money (and your investors', if you get any) and
achive nothing. Being a sucesfull entrepreneur would definitely make your
resume better, but that's not the end goal.

When you see startups being acquired by Google you shouldn't think the
founders reached their goal. Quite the opposite. It's usually a mild failure
(an "acquihire" or "softlanding"), they couldn't scale their company or raise
more money and selling to Google was the best thing they could do (besides
shuting down the business). Or it was a mild success, the entrepreneurs sold
to Google because they would get some sizeable amount of money fast enough,
rather than taking the risk to see if the company would become much larger
down the road, to sell or IPO at a much higher valuation 5 or 10 years later,
for instance.

In either cases the founders won't usually be happy to have become employees
once more, and will leave the acquirer as soon as they can and do something
else. They can't leave right after the acquisition because he will be vested
or will have golden handcuffs (ie.: won't get all his money if he leaves
before 2 or 3 years).

Ps.: I have a startup (for 6 years now) and before that I was studying to get
a Master's Degree. However, my A plan was always to start a company even once
I started the program. So once I got some money to start, I dropped out. I was
already quite tired of the academic life and don't regret it. Don't regret the
time I've spent doing the master's also, as it was a way to keep myself
ocuppied and get some ramen money, while having a lot of free time to work on
my product and think.

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ahmedbaracat
Thank you for the response. Quite informative. Special thanks for the PS, I am
actually pursuing a Master's degree and, like you, I am planning to start my
own company or work for a startup that I think is solving an important
problem. I also started to get tired of the academic life.

For me, being successful as a startup founder, is to bootstrap (I don't want
to loose the freedom of making my own decisions) a business that is solving a
"real" problem for enough users to have reasonable income. I am not planning
to scale just for the sake of scaling or to raise fund for expanding. I am
making the conscious decision to have a sustainable business with no exit
strategy.

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joeclark77
A PhD can give you an opportunity to work on what you call a "real" problem,
but it could also force you to work on "fake" problems. In many fields, the
research we academics must do to get hired/promoted/tenured is somewhat
artificial and unrelated to the problems we're in the classroom teaching our
students to solve. On the other hand there are great stories of PhD candidates
starting businesses. I think Google got its start as somebody's dissertation.

When considering a PhD, the best thing to do is look at the advisor(s) you'd
be working for and their repertoire of projects. Looking at the "discipline"
isn't precise enough; there's a wide range of stuff happening within fields
like information systems or computer science, everything from very theoretical
to very practical.

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ahmedbaracat
That's the problem, I am afraid that of my academic "encounters" where about
fake problems in order to get published or like you said to get hired etc.

Thank you for the advise, I agree that the discipline is not enough to make
the decision.

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throwaway_exer
HN sentiment is that startups are only worthwhile if you're a founder.

~~~
hanniabu
I can agree. Everything is fun and dandy at the start, but after a while the
frustration of lack of benefits compared to friends or lack of
influence/control in decisions, or lack of compensation will get to you.

