Another counter-example. I found my PhD both more and less constraining than a startup, at the same time. For reference, I obtained a PhD, and I am now doing a

Another counter-example. I found my PhD both more and less constraining than a startup, at the same time. For reference, I obtained a PhD, and I am now doing a startup. There are things that a startup can never replace. Most notably, access to domain experts whose goal is obtaining knowledge. In startup land, you get massive amounts of anecdote, but little knowledge. Almost all of that anecdote is geared towards earning money to the exclusion of all else. In academia, you get essentially the opposite. The reason I say that academia can be more constraining is that often you end up focussing on a single problem to the exclusion of all else. This can, but certainly does not always, harm your breadth of knowledge. In transition to a startup, the biggest difference to me was dispensing with "publish or perish." I've reproduced and experimented with more existing work than I ever did during my PhD. That's mostly because reproducing existing work doesn't earn you anything in academia, despite being a cornerstone of science. You spend as much time, and only as much time, reading background work as is necessary to do something new. Without having to publish, I've been free to really expand my breadth and understand which methods work and which don't in my new domain. All that said, what I'm doing in a startup is largely still applied research. This is a whole different beast than I see in most startups. Their goals appear to be chasing populism and money. The antithesis of academia.