misterballer

Hi adastra22, thanks so much for the honest reply! I really appreciate it. I agree that a PhD does not well for many (very) important parts of building a startup, such as marketing and prototype development. However, could you elaborate on why you think a PhD would not provide useful preparation at all? My thought was to use a PhD to build a broad, advanced technical skill set that might be harder to acquire in industry, where a role may focus on only one technology (or a set of technologies that are not very advanced). But perhaps I’m thinking about this the wrong way…

I agree that the conditions you listed are necessary for being a successful researcher. However, even if somebody were to meet those crtieria, it seems like they would still have little to no impact, since robotics capabilities research is such a popular and capacity-constrained field.

I.e. if I became a researcher at Deepmind / other labs, I would probably be taking a spot that another strong researcher would otherwise fill, limiting my marginal impact. Thus, my impact as a researcher would be close to zero, while at a startup, I could at least potentially have some impact.

Do you generally agree with this assessment?

I agree that discoveries take place independently. However, I am specifically interested in the case of hard-tech startups, of which there seems to be little discussion online surrounding their inevitability.