tech-companyI’m a CS major and I am thinking about going to graduate school and develop my ideas there until they are developed enough to found my own company. Is it worth it? Motivation behind going to graduate school is (1) I could develop my skills further, (2) I would go to a university with a better name (Ivy League). Considering those two factors, is it worth it before starting my own company?
I have Ph.D. in programming as well. I can tell you that accumulating skills and having a diploma from good university will not move you even 1 step further. since you want to build an application, your user will only care about its quality and if it helps them.
So, the only thing I would NOT do it starting startup company and going to PhD at the same time. That would be a disaster.
Now, ask yourself, do you really need Ph.D.? Having PhD will only get your brain full with information. Unless you already have years of programming experience, you will not benefit much from it, cause how can you understand some algorithm if you have not coded before.
Ph.D. would only be “concrete” if you want to write a book. In that case, go ahead to PhD and write your book while you study.
Whatever you decide, be sure that you don’t spend years studying and creating your app, and in the end realizing that your idea is old at the time your app is ready.
No.
At least not how you think it could help you. A PhD will not develop any skills which are beneficial for a startup. If you are doing a CS PhD you will learn nothing about marketing, design, business plans or similar.
A PhD is about the edge of research. When you finish a PhD you will have expert-level knowledge in a very, very tiny specialization. While you university studies are for a broad overview about many subjects, a PhD just digs deep. You will spend many years developing and researching on just a very specific task or problem.
So in that way it will not help you to develop any skills for an unrelated startup. Also, no one in the industry cares about whether you have a PhD or not. If you are not very well-known in a certain industry or are a rock-star researcher (which by definition you will not be after finishing your PhD) it does not matter. In the end, they also don’t care much about whether you have a diploma or not. They care about that the product you are developing has the prospect of earning money.
But in another way than you probably mean a PhD can lead to a startup. As you are on the absolute edge of a discipline and the goal of a PhD is to develop a new and novel idea, you might just do that. And yes, novel ideas are obviously something which can turn into a company. As a matter of fact, many startups are founded from researchers (e.g. Google is basically a Stanford campus project), but not because they wanted to found a startup. They tried to solve a problem and happened to do that. And this led to the founding of a company to monetize and further develop this idea (developing an idea is important as research normally does not really care about really working stuff. They might care about a protoype, but how to mass-produce this or how to handle operational problems does not matter to research).
To sum up, you should do a PhD if you really want to do research and want to known everything there is to know in a certain subject.
On the other hand (I mostly agree with the other answers, but this is a highly subjective idea):
Now, having asked ourselves these questions, let me share a story of a startup that I’m proud to have been an employee of, and that I’m proud to still hold onto the stock.
In 1995, one of the founders had an idea, while doing his PhD at MIT. This idea became central to the thesis of his research work, which was published in 1999 and he received his degree from. The idea is wide-reaching, but the technology in 1999 was not advanced enough to perform the necessary computations in real time, and thus it became a curiosity in the field of computer graphics.
In 1999, he has joined another startup company, and he improved his business skills.
In 2004, he has revisited his PhD work, starting the startup that I’m talking about. It was still sufficiently bleeding edge, that only large businesses and government contractors could afford this technology, but it was (and is) vastly superior to anything else.
He used the fact that the groundwork was researched and partially funded by his PhD institution (which actually is getting paid some percentage of the royalties on the patent), he used the Moore’s Law to bring this pie-in-the-sky concept into feasibility, and he used the time in between to work for someone else’s startup to gather experience and network.
By 2008, when I joined, it became feasible to do these computations on mid-to-high range graphics cards. That’s when we worked on bringing it down to workstations and small computer systems. Bulk of our orders are still video/movie industries and military simulations.
By 2010, when I left, the company was happily charging royalties from the patents and licenses to this technology from many manufacturers around the world.
Not once did this company attempt to sell directly to the consumer.
The application stack was buggy, ugly, but because it was so innovative, it was (and still is) the best out there. By now, it has vastly improved - because it becomes affordable by prosumers.
To summarize - if you want to do something cool, do some deep work, instead of rehashing and mashing up the frameworks to solve a real today’s problem - go for a PhD, and think about researching subjects that will have tremendous business applications in 10 years.
It depends.
The big thing about startups is that you can read and learn all you want, but until you do it will you understand it’s dichotomy.
Imagine knowing what to do, how to do it, but oddly it’s not getting done. Or you know how to do something, what the results will be, but not knowing where to start.
Finally it comes down to what issues do you plan to solve? Why do you need to get a PHD in order to solve it? And what is stopping you right now to drop everything and get working on it.
If you need the PHD then do it. If not I feel the money you would spend getting it would be better used as your seed funds.
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