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Comment by glimcat | Hacker News Reader

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glimcat

TIL grad students who have second thoughts about their PhD program are the new college dropouts.

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Yeah it seems a bit of a stretch to call someone with 3 degrees a dropout...

It's probably a marketing thing, since people with PhD's aren't usually the entrepreneur-type.

You'd be amazed by how many entrepreneurs have PhDs.

I would be. Is this really common? My own story is the common one of highshool dropout who dropped about because he was bored in school and this is something I hear about in many of my peers.

The attributes of good entrepreneurs and good research students are highly correlated. It's quite common in engineering, but less so in other fields where research isn't as likely to have direct commercial applications.

You guys are going to have to come up with some evidence. I don't see how someone who could go through the entire University process all the way to a research PhD if what they really wanted was to start their own business.

As perhaps the canonical Hacker News example, pg had his PhD and rtm was working on his when they founded Viaweb [1].

[1] Scroll down to "PEOPLE": http://paulgraham.com/vwplan.html

Examples are abundant. Stephen Wolfram would be a prominent example.

The "I need X, but existing X is nonexistent or crappy, so I'm going to make my own X" thinking seems to be a common motivator. Technically-competent entrepreneurs often fall into this case.

Meet some more grad students and you'll get a clearer picture of this fairly quickly. This is at least a consideration for many engineering grads.

Wolfram's one example. Most of the founders of Intel. Genentech. The vast majority of biotech or nanotech startups.

You won't find too many PhDs starting companies that make web apps and iPhone games, though. They're starting companies in the really high tech areas, areas at the forefront of technology that folks without PhDs don't understand just yet.

maybe they didn't know they wanted to start their own business until they were doing their Ph.D. (e.g., larry and sergey)

Edit: Or they wanted to start a business in a field where graduate level credentials are required for people to take you seriously (e.g., biotech, clean energy, medical devices, etc.)

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