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Comment by allisthemoist | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually at the point of considering graduate school to help my chances of establishing a life science based start-up in the future.

Is getting a graduate level degree (at least a Masters) a necessity to be the head of such a company? From what I've seen, most other companies in the space seem to be headed by people with either a PhD or MBA.

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I dropped out of college to found a med-tech company that went on to be funded by YC. Every other company in my space is founded by a doctor. I haven't noticed a difference in how we are treated yet. If you're good, you're good, and you can always hire the PhDs later on.

To be fair, you folks aren't doing research -- you're doing residency program scheduling. And domain expertise is more important for your product than any sort of theoretical knowledge of science or medicine.

To found a company doing scientific research, it helps a great deal not just to have a PhD, but to to be an established researcher in the field you're commercializing. Most scientific startups founded by outsiders are...transparently bad.

Agreed. It really depends on what you are going for. You can learn domain knowledge on the fly (a lot of ours is how the organization functions), but you can't gain a deep understanding of the science side like that.

My experience has been that the advanced degree would have helped a bit with VC interest and probably attracting cofounders. If there's not a specific time-sensitive market opportunity that you're going after, then I think you are right to consider it.

Working tech probably trumps academic credentials in these matters though -- so as long as you know what you're in for, dive right in.

Unless you're trying to start a "professional" firm (Law, Civil Engineering, Accounting, etc.) there are not really any educational requirements. Hell, most well-known entrepreneurs didn't even stick college out long enough to get a Bachelor's.

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