Why being a founder is probably harder for those trained in academia
P.S. My biased answer is at the end.
The life of a founder is a delicate dance, balancing on a tightrope of high-stakes challenges. They juggle the expectations of many — not least their own — while holding in their hands the livelihoods of their employees, families, and if luck favours them, the power to revolutionize the status quo for those their work aims to serve.
Similarly, academics face their own precarious balancing act. The climb up the academic ladder often leads to more administrative tasks, from writing grant proposals to managing personnel. Eventually, they are pulled away from the captivating research that originally lured them into the thrilling, yet unstable, world of academia.
Interestingly, the trials and tribulations of being a founder and a senior academic aren’t all that different. Both roles navigate intricate questions, financial hurdles, and the task of appeasing those who hold the keys to funding — be it government grant overseers, investors, or customers. Furthermore, both paths often offer a rollercoaster ride of learning and challenges in the every day. For both, serendipitous moments can catapult one’s work from the mundane to the extraordinary, or conversely, shatter it into obscurity. In fact, a close friend of mine (you know who you are) accidentally broke a *very* expensive piece of equipment in the middle of an experiment and wrote an entire field-defining piece of work on the basis of that breaking (which no one had done before!) — something neither they nor their supervisors expected or planned for, and yet which has changed their career forever.
Yet, despite the similarities, it’s far more common to see academics pivot into entrepreneurship than seeing the reverse. The hallowed halls of academia still maintain both their gatekeeping reputation and practices, demanding strict adherence to the ‘rules of the game’ from aspiring scholars. Arguably, this might be for the best — the disruptive nature of founders could potentially create more stir than anyone’s keen on on a Monday morning.
And yet if they are so alike — why would one suggest it’s challenging for academics to transition into the role of a founder?
To me, the answer lies in the very core of academic training. Academia instils a mindset of relentless skepticism, questioning, and hypothesis testing. It advises against betting on wild ideas unless an array of experiments provide solid evidence to back them up. In fact, being a good scientist means asking the right question at the right time, emerging from a logical flow of reasoning and filling gaps in (human) knowledge along the way.
On the other hand founders, while also masters of doubt, questioning and hypothesising, often lack the luxury of time and funds to run extensive experiments to mitigate their technical or market risks (academics may not have the luxury of funds, but usually have that of time and no clear deliverables). Their bets have to be placed on wild ideas with high stakes and no guarantee of being right. But, of course, all intuitions have to align towards them imagining a scenario where their hypotheses (which they’ve never tested along the way) align, and they happened to have seen it coming. It’s probably no surprise that most startups fail.
Therefore, I suspect and have experienced it myself that academics who venture into the world of entrepreneurship often find themselves needing to recalibrate their approach to decision-making. They need to maintain their logical reasoning while also learning to trust their intuition. And that transition seems to always be painful, especially if the business is R&D-led and can sometimes make the founder forget they’re no longer in [academic] Kansas anymore.
In essence the worlds of academics and founders, while filled with stark similarities, require fundamentally different mindsets. The journey of an academic-turned-founder is a test of adaptation, one that challenges them to reinvent their ingrained habits and perspectives. In some cases, and certainly in mine and that of some of my other fellow founders’ in the deep tech space, where they have applied their learnings from academia directly in their business — this mindset change can be even more fundamental, making them question if the scientific method itself has what it takes to make the leaps in thinking that so many disciplines at the frontier of our knowledge require.
