Employee => academia (PhD in AI) => open source (Gensim) => ML freelancing (radimrehurek.com) => ML consulting company (rare-technologies.com) => ML products (pii-tools.com, scaletext.ai).
Looking back, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to jump right into full-time products, skipping the intermediate budding steps. Is it a burden to understand the whole process, from accounting, legal, HR, management, ops, sales, support? Better to outsource them right away?
It's definitely true that all that ancillary stuff is a distraction, a (stressful) time sink. Especially when you're just starting out and clueless, like I was. Bootstrapping slows you down. On the other hand, it felt kinda natural, but took many years. Not the standard (?) SV path of rapid growth.
Quit in 2009, age 28. It was not that hard financially -- I moved to southern Thailand, worked on the PhD and Gensim there. Thailand is a pretty cheap country to live actually.
I feel like I'm not helping you guys much, because my circumstances may have been unique, but the honest answer is:
Not much negotiation needed. My uni had what I'd call an "old school AI department", grounded in linguistics / semantic web and RDFs / expert systems, that type of research. I was more into statistics, Bayesian inference and vectors. The mutual impact was lukewarm, and completing my thesis remotely not an issue.
Did "PhD" pedigree help in anyway? I mean you could do your research outside academia, since your department was not helping you (in research). But I guess US PhD stipend could be considered as a good salary in Thailand.
Most programs have a year or two of coursework, then it's just research and writing. So if you're ABD ("All But Dissertation") it wouldn't be a big deal if your advisor is on board. You can do committee meetings over videochat.
I was ABD and took a job, and finished my dissertation in the evenings. I basically just had to fly back to school to defend.
Looking back, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to jump right into full-time products, skipping the intermediate budding steps. Is it a burden to understand the whole process, from accounting, legal, HR, management, ops, sales, support? Better to outsource them right away?
It's definitely true that all that ancillary stuff is a distraction, a (stressful) time sink. Especially when you're just starting out and clueless, like I was. Bootstrapping slows you down. On the other hand, it felt kinda natural, but took many years. Not the standard (?) SV path of rapid growth.