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Comment by wellboy | Hacker News Reader

So true, gave you an upboat. I can seriously try 5 startups in 4 years and I'm a millionaire afterwards, can research on whatever I want and don't have to prove myself to nobody ever again. If you choose to do a PhD, you're still nothing afterwards and you still have to prove yourself to everybody, uargh...

Also, when I talk to PhDs, they seem like little kids who don't have an idea of anything in comparison to startup founders. --> Do a startup

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Startup founders are usually discussing consumer products which are by neccessity easy to comprehend. Research students usually delve into issues of high complexity for the task of progressing the state of the art. They don't often have to communicate the importance of their work to people like you.

The last picture in this article accurately describes what doing a PhD is all about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727

Pushing the envelope of human knowledge, one pixel at a time.

Yeah easy to comprehend in hindsight, obviously. Sorry didn't want to hate against PhD students, but I don't like the institution of a PhD. Most PhD thesises I have seen are just a waste of time of the PhD students. Less in science PhDs, more so in social studies, business...

> Most PhD thesises I have seen are just a waste of time of the PhD students

I'm curious why you feel qualified to judge the quality of PhD theses, or whether they were worth the authors' time. There's obviously a gradient in quality, but your post is overly dismissive.

Please see this article, which was here on hackernews and which gives you a bit more insight into my point of view "Dear brilliant students. Please consider not doing a PhD." http://liv.dreamwidth.org/389934.html

> I can seriously try 5 startups in 4 years and I'm a millionaire afterwards,

I'm guessing you aren't in the startup world, or haven't been for very long.

Why not, I'd even up this number to 8 startups in 4 years. Plus, the chance as a first time entrepreneur to have a successful(IPO/exit) startup are 12%: http://fundersandfounders.com/will-i-succeed-with-my-startup...

How many people in the SF Bay Area are working at startups? How many of them are millionaires?

Here's your answer.

well there's 50,000 startups on Angellist right now. Approx. 5,000 of them are funded so that their founders are millionaires. Here's your answer ;) And if your startup is not on Angellist, you haven't tried really.

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