akrish

If you’ve been reading my old blog posts, the ones from way back, you may have noticed that I have quite a few posts about entrepreneurship. I used to be really excited about starting my own company straight out of college. In my free time I’d read stuff by Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, and tons of blogs by founders and VCs. I’ve tried to start a couple of serious side projects with some of my friends, and we hoped to turn these into startups when we graduated. And most importantly, one of my dreams was to start my own company. 

Over the last year though, I’ve become really involved in a couple of research projects and my excitement about them has got me thinking about my life direction. Nowadays, when people ask me what I want to do after I graduate (which scarily isn’t that far away), I tell them that I want to go to grad school, get a doctorate degree, and possibly go into academia. If you asked me that question a year ago, I would have said that I wanted to start my own tech company. So why this sudden change?

Well first of all,  I actually don’t think that the two paths are all that different. I’m excited by working on really innovative, leading software/technology, and this property is essential in any research project as well as in any startup (at least to have some core competency). I love the challenge that comes with working on something that’s never been done before, and I definitely want that challenge in any thing I devote myself to. There are tons of other similarities, to name a few: 

• Both research and entrepreneurship have some component of selling your idea to others. With research, you need to get grant money, you need to present your work in a way that will get you published. With entrepreneurship, you need to pitch your startup to VCs, and VCs have to like what you’re doing.
• Both have quite close-knit communities. In research, you largely see the same people at conferences in your area; the grad students and professors that I’ve talked to know a lot of other researchers in their field just by attending conferences. You know who the top researchers are. It’s the same way with entrepreneurs, they have events like startup school as ways to meet fellow entrepreneurs. And of course, you know who the successful people are.
• Both typically involve some small group effort for awhile. With research, you often work in a small group, maybe of 2-4 people. Similarly, when you start a company, you may have 1 or 2 other co-founders and the founders are ultimately responsible for the success of the company. On a similar note, your effort can noticeably impact the success of the company or the research project, largely because there are so few people involved. This is really important to me, it’s one of the things that turns me off to large companies.

So these similarities are all awesome, and the fact that these are also around in the research world made it much easier to change my direction. Of course there are several differences. In a start-up, you have to do a lot more than just build your product; you have to hire employees, interact with VCs and customers, and a lot of the business/managerial stuff. In research (at least as a grad student), you do have to do some of the managerial stuff, writing papers and grant proposals, giving talks about your work (to gain credibility and support in the community), and as a professor the analogue to hiring employees is admitting and advising grad students. So yeah even here there are similarities, but I think this is a fundamental difference between entrepreneurship and research. As a young company, without some of these business skills, it will be very difficult to succeed. In research, your success is much more related to the quality of your work, and doesn’t depend so much on these auxiliary things.

Startups also need to build products, whereas in research, you can often get away with a good prototype. There’s a huge difference here and personally, I hate doing the work to turn a prototype into a product. In research, you just need your project to prove your point effectively, you don’t need your project to be visually appealing and entirely bug free. As an entrepreneur, you do need to spend a lot of time on this, potentially taking away from the core functionality and the level of innovation at your company. I really like this about research; you can focus entirely on the novel aspects of your project, you don’t have to waste time with the stuff you’d need to attract customers.

Now, I think the whole customer thing attracts people to entrepreneurship. They like to measure how successful they are by how many users they have, and yeah it feels great to have people using things that you built (or reading things that you wrote…). But I think there are ways to get this feeling in research too, one way to measure a researchers success is to look at their publications. Even better is to count citations. Citations tell you how many other researchers are looking at and using your work, and it’s pretty much the same measurement of success as the users one.

So research and entrepreneurship have some similarities, but they also have some fundamental differences. I think I transitioned from the latter to the former because I found that I didn’t want to get caught up in all the other stuff that comes with being a founder, I wanted to focus on the new technology. In my research I’m totally able to do that.

Another thing I love about research is that you’re always learning, and you’re always learning really cool things. Honestly, I wish I had the time to read a paper every day. I have a huge list of random papers that I want to read but there’s just too much stuff to do. As a researcher, it’s kind of your job to read random papers to see what other people are doing and to learn about new techniques. I don’t really know if this is around for entrepreneurs. You have to watch your competition but I don’t think you’ll learn much about their core technology. I’m not sure about this (and feedback would be awesome) but my impression is that you won’t experience the same state of perpetually learning in a startup.

Actually, I want to emphasize that last point. The constant learning really keeps me going. I don’t choose my classes because their easy, I choose them because I’ll learn a lot and because they sound interesting. I get really bored by easy classes because I don’t learn anything. I’m taking one of the hardest classes offered at my school this semester, and although it’s a ton of work, I love it because I’m learning so much.

So yeah, over this past year, the classes I’ve taken have pushed me in the direction of research. I’ve become involved in a couple of projects and I’ll be spending my summer exclusively doing research. Not that the dream of success as an entrepreneur has completely faded, but it’s definitely been put on the back-burner while I try to become a successful researcher.