During my years in college, a lot of grad and doctorate students would come in and try to help undergrads with their studies, projects, research, senior design projects etc.. What I came to realize is that you can't take what they say too seriously especially when you're aspiring to create something out of the ordinary. For me they weigh too heavily on research, research, research and if you can't validate every single thing you do, then don't do it. I don't agree with that, if you have an idea and think it'll work, do it, and if you execute it properly you will have some degree of success. For me that's the attitude that most of them had. Don't get me wrong, they were extremely intelligent but were too constrained by exact academic procedure and a lot of them had no experience in the real world, let alone the startup world. They would shoot down ideas and make you do ridiculous things for projects, that to me, made no sense and took away time from working on your product. I am not saying those things have no place, but at least from my experience, they weren't terribly interesting people, they were institutionalized by the academic system and didn’t really understand what you were trying to do.
When I say I have no admiration, I don't want to label every PHD that way. They are brilliant people. But for me when you do 4 years as an undergrad, go straight to your Masters in the same school and then to your Doctorate in the same school without anything in between, that doesn't require a lot of determination and resourcefulness. It's a lot easier and less risky to do that than create a startup around a crazy idea and potentially crash and burn. Then again, it might just have been my school.