Anecdotally (why my PhD turned out to be a bad idea): 1. I got a supervisor who gave her students a lot of freedom but it worked entirely the wrong way. 2. Th

Anecdotally (why my PhD turned out to be a bad idea): 1. I got a supervisor who gave her students a lot of freedom but it worked entirely the wrong way. 2. The UK doesn't pay well. 3. I didn't get any money for conference travel as my PhD stipend was a grant from my college. 4. Yeah, this is the fun one - you're doing a highly research focused degree and finding somewhere that actually has a foot in the real world, in the exact area you want to study and build a startup around, is difficult. But if you can pull it off, I'm sure it could work. I got a lot of credit for starting a startup around my PhD topic - but I was forced to do so because I simply couldn't continue working on this stuff in academia any more, as it was too applied for my university.