Most PhDs shouldn't, or can't, be a startup. If they could, something would be terribly wrong: Something that could be done by two cofounders in the proverbial

Most PhDs shouldn't, or can't, be a startup. If they could, something would be terribly wrong: Something that could be done by two cofounders in the proverbial garage, and paid for by commercial industry, was instead consuming valuable research funding. A PhD, like any form of research, prioritises in discovering the unknown and expanding what we know, rather than seeking a commercial goal. (The exception is projects that "win the lottery": they went digging somewhere that's useful research but commercially unpromising, and stumbled on something directly monetisable. This is the case for most biotech, but it is - by definition - rare.) But the people who do PhDs...that's a different matter. By the time you're eligible to do research, you've hauled yourself to the frontier of your chosen field, and fully grokked everything humanity knows so far about your topic. This kind of deep expertise can often pay off in solving an adjacent commercial goal. Take my history: I did my PhD in usable programming systems. The actual day-to-day work (controlled experiments, inventing and analysing imaginary hardware extension, writing papers) wasn't even a little bit commercially relevant. But the experience, the surrounding reading, the techniques, and the knowledge I picked up from colleagues really set me up for when I started my startup. These days, I head up https://anvil.works https://anvil.works, making a programming environment for the web that doesn't suck (along with a cofounder who did his PhD a few offices down, in human-computer interaction). Would Anvil make a good research topic? Hell, no - it's recycling good ideas from the last 20+ years. Do our research experiences make us really well positioned to solve this problem? Absolutely.