How my PhD unexpectedly carried over to entrepreneurship

Or, how my PhD wasn’t a total waste of time.

When I first quit my research job, one of my biggest fears was that I was throwing away my PhD degree.

I had spent many years in graduate school studying computer systems, learning to perform research, and publishing at top-tier conferences. When I graduated, the next step made sense. I would continue building a research career at Qualcomm Research, a leader in the mobile space with many interesting research problems to work on.

Quitting my job to be an entrepreneur felt like a huge career shift. But as I’ve gotten further into my career as an entrepreneur, I’ve been surprised at how much of the PhD experience has carried over to entrepreneurship.

Here are some of the biggest similarities.

Unstructured work.

The biggest difference between a PhD degree and most other degrees is that the PhD is unstructured. There are no guaranteed steps to success. There is no one telling you exactly what to build, how to build it, what numbers to collect, how to analyze them, etc.

Entrepreneurship is similar. No one can tell you the exact steps for building product, acquiring customers, monetizing, etc. Even if they have done it themselves, their advice is limited to their experiences. There is no guarantee that any of their advice meaningfully maps to your own venture.

Learning to navigate unstructured projects has been greatly beneficial.

It bleeds into your life.

During a PhD, there isn’t a clear separation between your research and your life. More often than not, your research project bleeds into all areas of your life. It becomes the problem that burns in the back of your head at all times. You go to sleep thinking about it. You wake up thinking about it. You think about it in the shower, at the gym, etc.

If you let it, entrepreneurship can also consume your life. It isn’t anything like a 9-to-5 job. There is always something to do: an email to respond to, a customer to contact, new features to implement, and code that should be refactored. And those are the tangible things to do. What truly consumes your mind are the unknown questions. Is this the right product? How do I acquire more users? Is my product messaging and positioning OK?

The whole product matters.

If there is one thing I’ve learned during my PhD, it is this:

Doing good research is one thing. Getting published is something else.

Of course your want to do good research. You’d hope that good research results in getting published well. But that isn’t necessarily true.

The reason is that a good paper is a good product. If the product isn’t good, chances of being published are low. You need to succinctly summarize and sell your work in the abstract. You need to get the reader excited in the introduction. You need to communicate well. The reader must understand your problem, your approach, and why you are making a contribution. You need the right graphs that prove your point. They should be easy to understand, present only the data necessary, and have good captions. You need to polish the product by repeatedly writing, proofreading, re-writing. There is a whole lot that goes into developing a paper.

This training crosses over well, although not completely, into entrepreneurship. Thinking about your product, and all the pieces of it, is very important. The whole package matters. How do you reach your users? How do you get their interest? Is your landing page good? Is your About page OK? Is your product intuitive and easy to use?

The process and the tools are different, but having worked on papers has crossed over well to beginning to think about entrepreneurship.

Refining your evaluation of ideas.

One of the huge benefits of doing a PhD is that you get the chance to define a research direction and a research project. During this process you learn how to come up with ideas, evaluate the ideas, and choose a project to work on, or an experiment to try.

As you progress in your research, you get better at this. You learn how to spot large problems. You get a sense for what will work, and what is publishable.

Learning to think about and evaluate ideas is valuable as an entrepreneur also. The biggest difference is in your evaluation function.

As a PhD, the question to answer is: what is novel and has research impact?

As an entrepreneur, the question is: what needs can I solve and what is viable as a business?

Experimentation.

A large part of research is experimentation. You come up with a hypothesis, and run experiments to prove or disprove your hypothesis. You get good at coming up with a quick experiment for gathering data, looking at the data, and deciding if you should continue or you should change your research idea.

It is useful to think of entrepreneurship as experimentation also. Everything is an experiment. You try different things with your product. You try different ways targeting a specific niche of users. You try changing your niche. You try different methods of distribution. There is so much to figure out, and the only way to do it is to get something out there, give it a try, gather some data, and learn from it.

Related work search.

During research, you get really good at keeping up with the state of the art. You learn to do background searches in an area, distill all the relevant works, come up with an idea, and then differentiate your approach from prior art.

This carries over to entrepreneurship to some degree. It is useful it have experience searching for related work, and thinking about how to extend that work, or differentiate from the prior work.

Entrepreneurship as research.

Paul Graham said it well in a recent essay on startup growth.

“Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be a research scientist: you’re not committing to solve any specific problem; you don’t know for sure which problems are soluble; but you’re committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don’t discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity.”

There are many similarities between research and entrepreneurship. I’ve listed a few, but I’m sure there are a lot more. There are also differences, but that will be saved for a future blog post.

The point of this post is that initially, I was afraid that my PhD may have been a waste of time. But now, I can definitely say that it wasn’t. There is a ton to learn, but the PhD experience has given me a great foundation to build upon.

Could I have learned the same lessons without a PhD, and in a shorter span of time? Surely it is possible. But that is a whole different question that I do not have a good answer to at the moment.