>No, the startup scene is a side effect of a lot of money floating around in a place where there is little job security and surplus of people ready to gamble a

>No, the startup scene is a side effect of a lot of money floating around in a place where there is little job security and surplus of people ready to gamble a couple of years of their life in return for a very small chance at success. Exactly, although the people you're describing are just the founders. There are people in the startup scene who're employees, and for them, getting and keeping a job at a startup for a couple of years, say, is a good enough launchpad for their careers in the industry. And there's a surplus of such people that needs to be employed. We're experiencing a glut of highly educated people worldwide and academia simply doesn't have the capacity to absorb them. I think I've read on HN recently that there's more funding for startups than academia overall -- and of course I can't find it again -- but here's an actual comment from HN just two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15380625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15380625 >Of the cohort of PhD students I went through with, from a rough guess (I haven't taken exact count), the most common role is now "startup CEO", followed by "engineer at enviable company", followed only then by "teaching and research academic". Startups are the new academia.