6 ms·

PhD vs Startup

45 points by amiune 13y ago

jurassic 13y ago
This post seems to miss the point that the two choices address completely different goals. Do you want to be a professor? Better get that doctorate. Want bags of money? Better work on your idea for the Next Big Thing. Both paths have upsides and downsides, but the important difference is that they're taking you toward different destinations.
maaku 13y ago
Be honest: chances are the startup will fail. (And probably for reasons you have little control over, so don't think you can just avoid the mistakes.) So at the end of 5 years, what have you got? With the Ph.D you've got something recognizable and real academic cred. With the startup it'd be a bit of a mixed bag. If you knew the startup would fail, would you still choose it over the Ph.D?
- pmb 13y ago
  PhD programs in CS have a 30% completion rate. (No citation, but true of the program I finished and all others I know) It's not that safe.
  - maaku 13y ago
    Yes, but how much of that is due to factors outside of the candidate's control?
- beezlebob 13y ago
  There seems to be an attack on academic credentials of late, MBAs, PhD etc, even to the point that people are being told to drop out of school. Yes there is a possibility to make it rich without all of the above, but there is an extremely high chance of failing. A lot of people who are making such claims about education are making them from a dishonest position.
john_w_t_b 13y ago
Don't agree with this statement from the post. "A PhD is safer. If you don’t do so well, you are going to get the title anyways. A Startup is riskier. If you don’t do very well (90% of the time), you can end broke." Plenty of people drop out without finishing their PhD and generally they are broke afterwards. I'd say a startup is safer as you are closer to industry in case you need to find a job.
- fnayr 13y ago
  Yep, out of my class of 7 in my PhD program, two were forced out. They did/will get a masters, but that's not the same.
  - john_w_t_b 13y ago
    I dropped out of my CS PhD after two years. I regret not doing a startup instead. I was working for a big tech firm in Silicon Valley in late 2000. I was looking for a career change so I applied to a few startups including Google. The Google recruiter called me repeatedly to come in for an interview, but I decided to quit the job search and pursue a PhD instead. Studying for a PhD was fun, but I couldn't adjust to the lower income. I'd been working in industry for the previous five years so it was a 80% drop in income at least. Plus I got married and had a kid in those two years. That complicated things considerably.
    - beezlebob 13y ago
      >Studying for a PhD was fun, but I couldn't adjust to the lower income. I'd been working in industry for the previous five years so it was a 80% drop in income at least. Plus I got married and had a kid in those two years. That complicated things considerably. I believe the author is suggesting that the person starts their own startup, not going to work for one. I would suggest in that case theere would be a considerable drop in income also.
  - shriphani 13y ago
    What does "forced out" mean?
auctiontheory 13y ago
The author's view of PhD programs seems unrealistically positive. Maybe he means a CS PhD, but then the bit about changing the world makes even less sense. Startups are for pragmatic (as opposed to idealistic) self-starters. I think most PhD students identify with "I want to think deeply and learn a lot about one thing" much more than they identify with "I am a self-starter who loves to work in an unstructured environment."
- burntsushi 13y ago
  > I think most PhD students identify with "I want to think deeply and learn a lot about one thing" much more than they identify with "I am a self-starter who loves to work in an unstructured environment." Chiming in as a counter-example! Having an unstructured environment with few constraints is incredibly rewarding. If you pressed me, it might actually be my favorite part about being in academia. (My experience with other PhD students agrees with your generalization, though.)
  - tracker1 13y ago
    I think it depends on what PhD program you are looking at... the people you have to deal with in say a Psychology program are a bit different than what you would see in a CS program. The culture can be very different, and the expectations of conformity can be even more so.
    - burntsushi 13y ago
      Oh, definitely. I should have added that "CS" qualifier in there.
  - p4bl0 13y ago
    I completely agree with you. The few-constraints-and-unstructured-environment is one of the main reason I'm doing a PhD. I wrote about it two years ago [1] while I was questioning myself about PhD vs. startup. [1] http://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html http://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html
- 13y ago
carterschonwald 13y ago
this entire post has wildly false premises, on both sides. on one side: the majority of engineers working at startups are hired and paid. on the other side: The vast majority of CS phds can't get an academic job unless they don't have any constraints on where they wish to live. The moment you have any location preferences and want an academic job, you have to be total super star, which is hard, and by definition few people will be. Theres also the fact that the typical phd recipient will never earn back the lost income from the extra years of education over their master degree only clone. being a startup founder or a phd student, both can suck, they're fundamentally different experiences, and when one or another works out well for someone, its an incredibly unique and personal situation that will not be replicable by anyone else.
- zura 13y ago
  Totally agree. PhD/academic path is stuck in 1800s. I just don't want to relocate on every next academic job (starting from PhD).
- mahrz 13y ago
  I agree with that, except for the lost income, this recent study [1] showed that your lifetime earnings will quite likely be more if get a PhD (not accounting for tuition, not sure about it then). I think that the differences are so marginal in the end, that it should not be money that decides whether you want to go for a PhD or not ... [1] http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/collegepayoff-complete.pdf http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/collegepay...
  - carterschonwald 13y ago
    the linked document gives a (LIFETIME) earnings gap in STEM for masters vs phd as < 100k. Considering good negotiation skills can create a delta in salary of more than 10k, thats a difference on the order of statistical noise. You are right, the income element is orthogonal to phd or not. But if one cares about where one lives AND enjoying ones work, more than one cares about teaching at a university somewhere on the planet, they'll be much happier not doing a phd program. Research is fun, learning is fun, engineering great new tech is fun. A phd is a university teaching certificante, not a magic "i can do good research and build great tech" certificate (though they can be highly correlated.).
return0 13y ago
Lots of false dichotomies and exaggerations. One does not even preclude the other.
javert 13y ago
> you can have a greater impact by doing research. At least that's my opinion. I have tons of respect for entrepreneurs like Henry Ford or Larry Page but can you compare their contributions to the ones of Carl Friedrich Gauss or Alan Turing? As a PhD student, I tend to think the opposite. Entrepreneurs who are successful tend to change the world, or at least improve it. Even if you have a small business, you are helping fuel the economy. It seems that most academics tend not to improve the world or fuel the economy.
- testbro 13y ago
  Matt Might's illustrated guide to the PhD sort of shows this quite succinctly [1]. I don't think there are any memorable PhD theses that significantly changed anything, save for Shannon's. World-changing researchers do exist, but I think they are created after they obtain their PhD, rather than before; it's unreasonable in my eyes to expect anyone to make such significant contributions in the infancy of their research careers. [1] : http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
  - gjm11 13y ago
    It's not unheard of for PhD thesis work to change the world within the academic discipline in question. Possible examples: Louis de Broglie (quantum physics applied to electrons as well as photons), Hugh Everett (many-worlds interpretation of QM), John Nash (Nash equilibria in game theory), Bernhard Riemann (conformal mapping, simple-connectedness, Laudent series), Noam Chomsky (transformational grammar), Eric Drexler (first proposal of nanotechnology). Also, I think Google came out of Page's & Brin's PhD work, but they decided that building a company around it was a better idea than getting PhDs for it.
    - javert 13y ago
      > within the academic discipline in question. This is a nit pick, but all the examples you gave are of people who actually changed the world, not just some sliver of academia. That said, changing your sliver of academia is likely to imply changing the world if you're in certain areas of math or science or engineering. The only time when you can change your sliver of academia but not change the real world, is when your sliver of academia does not contribute to the real world, which is (unfortunately) common, particularly in the humanities. (Which is sad, because we actually really need good humanities study/education in order to build a good world.)
harshadura 13y ago
nice article
outside1234 13y ago
can we get the ability to downvote articles i don't even know where to start with this one - its better if it just vanishes.
frzzl 13y ago
If you're a retard, do a PhD. Otherwise, startup.
Fomite 13y ago
"The PhD...a job at the end it’s guaranteed" And this is where I stopped taking the author seriously - they've got a seriously rose colored view of the job market.
wellboy 13y ago
How does one change the world with a PhD? One's contribution is very little among all the other hundreds of researchers that are trying to work out that one problem and most of the time, your PhD doesn't have an impact at all.
- MojoJolo 13y ago
  I think most of the researchers that are trying to work out that one problem have a PhD degree. As you said (in which I disagree), maybe a single PhD can't change the world, but their collective effort and knowledge can.
- aufreak3 13y ago
  That's one way to look at it. From the perspective of a researcher, if you're true to your work, you're really at the vanguard asking hard questions and probing the limits of your own mind and its fallacious thinking .. no matter how small your domain of interest is. I came across a joke once that resonated since it felt like truth being spoken in the clothes of humour -- "When you finish a bachelor's degree, you think you know something about something. When you finish your Masters, you realize you don't know anything about anything and are in awe of other minds around you. When you finish your PhD, you realize that nobody really knows anything about anything, including you." The offshoot of that last realization is true humility that shows as a deep appreciation for the steady progress being made at the boundary of knowledge, and the wisdom in finding the right question to ask. To put it another way, both endeavours have tremendous impact on the person. If "finding out about stuff" is your thing, getting a PhD would be worth it. If "doing stuff" is your thing, a startup would be worth it. PS: This one just submitted his thesis and is considering starting a company.
marmaduke 13y ago
> Both take at least five years. Europeans do it in 3 or 4. > In a PhD you have a scholarship and a tutor that tells you what to do. Salary is usually contingent on applications, work, etc. After the first half, the PhD should be directing the project, not the tutor. > A PhD is safer. If you don’t do so well, you are going to get the title anyways. A PhD is only a PhD if you make it to the endgame. You can fail quickly or slowly in an infinite cornucopia of ways. > In a PhD you learn a lot about an specific subject. If you have two brain cells to rub together, you learn just as much about yourself, people's motivations, etc. as you do about the domain. > If what you want to do is to change the world, go with the PhD. A PhD is at best learning to do research, not much else, and at worst, a poorly paid programmer or lab tech. Changing the world is thing altogether.
greenyoda 13y ago
It's not a dichotomy. You could do neither a PhD nor a startup, and that's also a perfectly legitimate option.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
stared 13y ago
Being a PhD student myself, I have to disagree with the last point: changing the world (actually, it was one of things that lured me were I am). While doing PhD you can be pretty certain that you won't become rich, it is also unlikely that you will change the world. And comparing with science long-dead science luminaries is unfair - it used to be possible to make a (scientific) breakthrough working alone. But, say, for 50 years or so it is no longer true (the transition was smooth). When a field is fresh you can make a great in your garage; latter - not so. Also, academia is a strictly top-down organization with all its consequences for creativity (in particular, having a great idea and skills at 17 yo will allow you to startup, put not - to assemble a research group). So if there is a great impact to the world by a PhD student, I can bet a lot, that it is because it was the PhD student's side project.
simonbarker87 13y ago
A PhD does not take at least 5 years, I did mine in just under 3 and am now 2 years in to a startup I founded which will take at least 5 years. The final point is also very very wrong. PhD's don't change the world, they push the boundary of what we know a tiny tiny bit forward. And it's widely known that a start up is not the most effective way to earn lots of money, investment banking or working your way up the corporate ladder is. The main difference is that a start up is probably more fun and fulfilling.
- kd0amg 13y ago
  A PhD does not take at least 5 years, I did mine in just under 3 and am now 2 years in to a startup I founded which will take at least 5 years. I think the post is meant to be about an American PhD program, not a European one. 3-year PhDs in the US are pretty rare.
  - simonbarker87 13y ago
    Ah right, I'd forgotten that. Bit of a drag like, 5 years!
yamalight 13y ago
It's also possible to do both. It's a bit harder than just one a time, but possible
- yamalight 13y ago
  Forgot to add that this way works especially well, when you startup and PhD are in the same area.
leftnode 13y ago
Why not both? The university I attended, UT Dallas, has a program called the Venture Development Center. Professors can pitch a start-up idea, and if they get accepted, the university donates office space and computers/software/etc. The professors Ph.D students get to work on the startup as an employee while also working toward their Ph.D.
mrcactu5 13y ago
PhD's and Startups are similar enough experiences that they can be constrasted. Every PhD is unique - REALLY unique and only a few people in the world understand. Startups these days seem to be as individual. I agree that PhD's and startups have similar elements of risk. In both spaces, it's possible to stick to safe ideas or ideas that don't meet approval of your colleagues. Startups teach you to be responsible for your own ideas, in a way the PhD system does not. Not every PhD student has a scholarship. The ones who don't get a fellowship, tend not to accept. The ones that do get money still don't really understand where that money comes from.

45 points by amiune 13y ago

This post seems to miss the point that the two choices address completely different goals. Do you want to be a professor? Better get that doctorate. Want bags of money? Better work on your idea for the Next Big Thing. Both paths have upsides and downsides, but the important difference is that they're taking you toward different destinations.

maaku 13y ago

Be honest: chances are the startup will fail. (And probably for reasons you have little control over, so don't think you can just avoid the mistakes.) So at the end of 5 years, what have you got? With the Ph.D you've got something recognizable and real academic cred. With the startup it'd be a bit of a mixed bag. If you knew the startup would fail, would you still choose it over the Ph.D?

pmb 13y ago
PhD programs in CS have a 30% completion rate. (No citation, but true of the program I finished and all others I know) It's not that safe.
- maaku 13y ago
  Yes, but how much of that is due to factors outside of the candidate's control?
beezlebob 13y ago
There seems to be an attack on academic credentials of late, MBAs, PhD etc, even to the point that people are being told to drop out of school. Yes there is a possibility to make it rich without all of the above, but there is an extremely high chance of failing. A lot of people who are making such claims about education are making them from a dishonest position.

john_w_t_b 13y ago

Don't agree with this statement from the post. "A PhD is safer. If you don’t do so well, you are going to get the title anyways. A Startup is riskier. If you don’t do very well (90% of the time), you can end broke." Plenty of people drop out without finishing their PhD and generally they are broke afterwards. I'd say a startup is safer as you are closer to industry in case you need to find a job.

fnayr 13y ago
Yep, out of my class of 7 in my PhD program, two were forced out. They did/will get a masters, but that's not the same.
- john_w_t_b 13y ago
  I dropped out of my CS PhD after two years. I regret not doing a startup instead. I was working for a big tech firm in Silicon Valley in late 2000. I was looking for a career change so I applied to a few startups including Google. The Google recruiter called me repeatedly to come in for an interview, but I decided to quit the job search and pursue a PhD instead. Studying for a PhD was fun, but I couldn't adjust to the lower income. I'd been working in industry for the previous five years so it was a 80% drop in income at least. Plus I got married and had a kid in those two years. That complicated things considerably.
  - beezlebob 13y ago
    >Studying for a PhD was fun, but I couldn't adjust to the lower income. I'd been working in industry for the previous five years so it was a 80% drop in income at least. Plus I got married and had a kid in those two years. That complicated things considerably. I believe the author is suggesting that the person starts their own startup, not going to work for one. I would suggest in that case theere would be a considerable drop in income also.
- shriphani 13y ago
  What does "forced out" mean?

auctiontheory 13y ago

The author's view of PhD programs seems unrealistically positive. Maybe he means a CS PhD, but then the bit about changing the world makes even less sense. Startups are for pragmatic (as opposed to idealistic) self-starters. I think most PhD students identify with "I want to think deeply and learn a lot about one thing" much more than they identify with "I am a self-starter who loves to work in an unstructured environment."

burntsushi 13y ago
> I think most PhD students identify with "I want to think deeply and learn a lot about one thing" much more than they identify with "I am a self-starter who loves to work in an unstructured environment." Chiming in as a counter-example! Having an unstructured environment with few constraints is incredibly rewarding. If you pressed me, it might actually be my favorite part about being in academia. (My experience with other PhD students agrees with your generalization, though.)
- tracker1 13y ago
  I think it depends on what PhD program you are looking at... the people you have to deal with in say a Psychology program are a bit different than what you would see in a CS program. The culture can be very different, and the expectations of conformity can be even more so.
  - burntsushi 13y ago
    Oh, definitely. I should have added that "CS" qualifier in there.
- p4bl0 13y ago
  I completely agree with you. The few-constraints-and-unstructured-environment is one of the main reason I'm doing a PhD. I wrote about it two years ago [1] while I was questioning myself about PhD vs. startup. [1] http://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html http://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html
13y ago

carterschonwald 13y ago

this entire post has wildly false premises, on both sides. on one side: the majority of engineers working at startups are hired and paid. on the other side: The vast majority of CS phds can't get an academic job unless they don't have any constraints on where they wish to live. The moment you have any location preferences and want an academic job, you have to be total super star, which is hard, and by definition few people will be. Theres also the fact that the typical phd recipient will never earn back the lost income from the extra years of education over their master degree only clone. being a startup founder or a phd student, both can suck, they're fundamentally different experiences, and when one or another works out well for someone, its an incredibly unique and personal situation that will not be replicable by anyone else.

zura 13y ago
Totally agree. PhD/academic path is stuck in 1800s. I just don't want to relocate on every next academic job (starting from PhD).
mahrz 13y ago
I agree with that, except for the lost income, this recent study [1] showed that your lifetime earnings will quite likely be more if get a PhD (not accounting for tuition, not sure about it then). I think that the differences are so marginal in the end, that it should not be money that decides whether you want to go for a PhD or not ... [1] http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/collegepayoff-complete.pdf http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/collegepay...
- carterschonwald 13y ago
  the linked document gives a (LIFETIME) earnings gap in STEM for masters vs phd as < 100k. Considering good negotiation skills can create a delta in salary of more than 10k, thats a difference on the order of statistical noise. You are right, the income element is orthogonal to phd or not. But if one cares about where one lives AND enjoying ones work, more than one cares about teaching at a university somewhere on the planet, they'll be much happier not doing a phd program. Research is fun, learning is fun, engineering great new tech is fun. A phd is a university teaching certificante, not a magic "i can do good research and build great tech" certificate (though they can be highly correlated.).

return0 13y ago

Lots of false dichotomies and exaggerations. One does not even preclude the other.

javert 13y ago

> you can have a greater impact by doing research. At least that's my opinion. I have tons of respect for entrepreneurs like Henry Ford or Larry Page but can you compare their contributions to the ones of Carl Friedrich Gauss or Alan Turing? As a PhD student, I tend to think the opposite. Entrepreneurs who are successful tend to change the world, or at least improve it. Even if you have a small business, you are helping fuel the economy. It seems that most academics tend not to improve the world or fuel the economy.

testbro 13y ago
Matt Might's illustrated guide to the PhD sort of shows this quite succinctly [1]. I don't think there are any memorable PhD theses that significantly changed anything, save for Shannon's. World-changing researchers do exist, but I think they are created after they obtain their PhD, rather than before; it's unreasonable in my eyes to expect anyone to make such significant contributions in the infancy of their research careers. [1] : http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
- gjm11 13y ago
  It's not unheard of for PhD thesis work to change the world within the academic discipline in question. Possible examples: Louis de Broglie (quantum physics applied to electrons as well as photons), Hugh Everett (many-worlds interpretation of QM), John Nash (Nash equilibria in game theory), Bernhard Riemann (conformal mapping, simple-connectedness, Laudent series), Noam Chomsky (transformational grammar), Eric Drexler (first proposal of nanotechnology). Also, I think Google came out of Page's & Brin's PhD work, but they decided that building a company around it was a better idea than getting PhDs for it.
  - javert 13y ago
    > within the academic discipline in question. This is a nit pick, but all the examples you gave are of people who actually changed the world, not just some sliver of academia. That said, changing your sliver of academia is likely to imply changing the world if you're in certain areas of math or science or engineering. The only time when you can change your sliver of academia but not change the real world, is when your sliver of academia does not contribute to the real world, which is (unfortunately) common, particularly in the humanities. (Which is sad, because we actually really need good humanities study/education in order to build a good world.)

harshadura 13y ago

nice article

outside1234 13y ago

can we get the ability to downvote articles i don't even know where to start with this one - its better if it just vanishes.

frzzl 13y ago

If you're a retard, do a PhD. Otherwise, startup.

Fomite 13y ago

"The PhD...a job at the end it’s guaranteed" And this is where I stopped taking the author seriously - they've got a seriously rose colored view of the job market.

wellboy 13y ago

How does one change the world with a PhD? One's contribution is very little among all the other hundreds of researchers that are trying to work out that one problem and most of the time, your PhD doesn't have an impact at all.

MojoJolo 13y ago
I think most of the researchers that are trying to work out that one problem have a PhD degree. As you said (in which I disagree), maybe a single PhD can't change the world, but their collective effort and knowledge can.
aufreak3 13y ago
That's one way to look at it. From the perspective of a researcher, if you're true to your work, you're really at the vanguard asking hard questions and probing the limits of your own mind and its fallacious thinking .. no matter how small your domain of interest is. I came across a joke once that resonated since it felt like truth being spoken in the clothes of humour -- "When you finish a bachelor's degree, you think you know something about something. When you finish your Masters, you realize you don't know anything about anything and are in awe of other minds around you. When you finish your PhD, you realize that nobody really knows anything about anything, including you." The offshoot of that last realization is true humility that shows as a deep appreciation for the steady progress being made at the boundary of knowledge, and the wisdom in finding the right question to ask. To put it another way, both endeavours have tremendous impact on the person. If "finding out about stuff" is your thing, getting a PhD would be worth it. If "doing stuff" is your thing, a startup would be worth it. PS: This one just submitted his thesis and is considering starting a company.

marmaduke 13y ago

> Both take at least five years. Europeans do it in 3 or 4. > In a PhD you have a scholarship and a tutor that tells you what to do. Salary is usually contingent on applications, work, etc. After the first half, the PhD should be directing the project, not the tutor. > A PhD is safer. If you don’t do so well, you are going to get the title anyways. A PhD is only a PhD if you make it to the endgame. You can fail quickly or slowly in an infinite cornucopia of ways. > In a PhD you learn a lot about an specific subject. If you have two brain cells to rub together, you learn just as much about yourself, people's motivations, etc. as you do about the domain. > If what you want to do is to change the world, go with the PhD. A PhD is at best learning to do research, not much else, and at worst, a poorly paid programmer or lab tech. Changing the world is thing altogether.

greenyoda 13y ago

It's not a dichotomy. You could do neither a PhD nor a startup, and that's also a perfectly legitimate option.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

stared 13y ago

Being a PhD student myself, I have to disagree with the last point: changing the world (actually, it was one of things that lured me were I am). While doing PhD you can be pretty certain that you won't become rich, it is also unlikely that you will change the world. And comparing with science long-dead science luminaries is unfair - it used to be possible to make a (scientific) breakthrough working alone. But, say, for 50 years or so it is no longer true (the transition was smooth). When a field is fresh you can make a great in your garage; latter - not so. Also, academia is a strictly top-down organization with all its consequences for creativity (in particular, having a great idea and skills at 17 yo will allow you to startup, put not - to assemble a research group). So if there is a great impact to the world by a PhD student, I can bet a lot, that it is because it was the PhD student's side project.

simonbarker87 13y ago

A PhD does not take at least 5 years, I did mine in just under 3 and am now 2 years in to a startup I founded which will take at least 5 years. The final point is also very very wrong. PhD's don't change the world, they push the boundary of what we know a tiny tiny bit forward. And it's widely known that a start up is not the most effective way to earn lots of money, investment banking or working your way up the corporate ladder is. The main difference is that a start up is probably more fun and fulfilling.

kd0amg 13y ago
A PhD does not take at least 5 years, I did mine in just under 3 and am now 2 years in to a startup I founded which will take at least 5 years. I think the post is meant to be about an American PhD program, not a European one. 3-year PhDs in the US are pretty rare.
- simonbarker87 13y ago
  Ah right, I'd forgotten that. Bit of a drag like, 5 years!

yamalight 13y ago

It's also possible to do both. It's a bit harder than just one a time, but possible

yamalight 13y ago
Forgot to add that this way works especially well, when you startup and PhD are in the same area.

leftnode 13y ago

Why not both? The university I attended, UT Dallas, has a program called the Venture Development Center. Professors can pitch a start-up idea, and if they get accepted, the university donates office space and computers/software/etc. The professors Ph.D students get to work on the startup as an employee while also working toward their Ph.D.

mrcactu5 13y ago

PhD's and Startups are similar enough experiences that they can be constrasted. Every PhD is unique - REALLY unique and only a few people in the world understand. Startups these days seem to be as individual. I agree that PhD's and startups have similar elements of risk. In both spaces, it's possible to stick to safe ideas or ideas that don't meet approval of your colleagues. Startups teach you to be responsible for your own ideas, in a way the PhD system does not. Not every PhD student has a scholarship. The ones who don't get a fellowship, tend not to accept. The ones that do get money still don't really understand where that money comes from.