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s tartups and academia are rarely mentioned together in the same context. Yet, going through a Ph.D. program in engineering almost guarantees a meeting with any Silicon Valley investor. If you ask one of these investors why they have a bias for people in academia, they mention many different things: “they are smart,” “they

probably have a cool technology that nobody has,” or “they might be the next Google.” We don’t know exactly what aspects of a Ph.D. program prepare one to be an entrepreneur. However, in our experience there is a striking similarity between starting a company and

Want a Tenure? Try a startupWhy running a startup is a lot like building a research lab.

By Eldar Sadikov and Montse MedinaDOI: 10.1145/2173637.2173646

starting a research lab as a young facul-ty member. We were two Stanford Ph.D. students who were very deep into our programs when we took leave to start a company, Jetlore, last year. Jetlore develops technology to infer semantic context from short text typical of social networks. Neither of us have had the privilege to carry a professorship title, but we have been exposed to academia long enough to know both the perks and the challenges of professorship. We’ve been on both sides of the fence, and we’d like to share our thoughts with you on why running a startup is a lot like building a research lab.

Computer scientists are trained to solve problems. We like clearly postu-lated problems with definitive solu-tions. Computer scientists in academia do exactly this: They usually have a gen-eral research agenda, which defines a class of problems in some field, and they tackle one problem at a time, pub-lishing the results at research venues. As an entrepreneur, you are facing a similar task. But instead of a field of re-search problems, the field you play in is the one of market problems: You want

to find a solution to an existing need in the market. A startup typically tries to address a need in the market because there are no tools to satisfy the need or the existing tools are suboptimal.

In our case, there is a need for con-sumer products to rely on the social content (for personalization or richer context). However, the tools to inte-grate social content into consumer products are very primitive. Social con-tent is usually in the form of short tex-tual snippets, and, to our knowledge,

there is currently no technology to deal with such short colloquial text. As a re-sult, consumer products cannot lever-age social content and there is a strong need for our technology. This problem of understanding social content is an issue that academics are starting to tackle, but we sensed what was pres-ently missing from the market, and re-alized we could make a bigger impact by taking our academic skills outside the classroom.

In both academia and startups, the problems you tackle define your purpose and mission. For a young pro-fessor, your mission is your research agenda. For a startup, your mission is solving a specific market need. In both cases, you are expected to ex-ecute toward your mission. When you are hired as a faculty member at a re-search institution, you are expected to produce high-impact research results as outlined in your research agenda. Similarly, when an entrepreneur starts a company, you are expected to solve a particular market need with some technology or product.

The execution toward your mis-

If you don’t have a convincing story for why people should fund you, buy your product, read your papers, or join your team, you are unlikely to be successful.

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of the most respected universities in the world, had multiple top-tier confer-ence publications, and received job of-fers in the six-figure range. Even given this, the choice felt right to us, in the same way the choice in favor of an aca-demic career seems straightforward to the most successful faculty.

Your career choice is only the begin-ning of the hard choices you have to make to execute toward your mission. Both young faculty and entrepreneurs are operating in the presence of lim-ited time, limited budget, and a lot of uncertainty. Tenure-track, young faculty usually have five or six years to prove themselves before their tenure review. During that time they are more likely to have a hard time finding fund-ing. There is also a lot of uncertainty in choosing research ideas, which grant to apply for, and even the graduate students they want to take on. This is in addition to their inexperience: Most of them have never applied for grants or advised graduate students before. Analogously, startup founders have very little funding, have a very short time frame until they run out of it, and have a lot of uncertainty around almost anything they do—who to hire, which

sion starts from making tough choic-es. Often the toughest choice one has to make is the career choice. A newly minted doctorate degree re-cipient has to make a choice between an academic career and industry in the same way an entrepreneur has to make a choice between starting a company and joining a company. This choice is harder than you think. When a graduating Ph.D. student ap-plies for faculty jobs, you have to be willing to potentially sacrifice loca-tion, compensation (junior faculty salaries are usually lower than the in-dustry salaries for Ph.D. graduates, at least in Silicon Valley), and a certain level of comfort. It is the same for an entrepreneurial computer scientist choosing between a comfortable en-gineering job with high salary and an uncertain, highly demanding, mostly unpaid (at least for the first few years) career of an entrepreneur.

For us, the choice was not easy ei-ther: Both of us were on a good track to graduation when we decided to take leave from the program to start Jetlore. Our decision seemed crazy to our peers: We had spent more than three years in a Ph.D. program at one

markets to pursue first, how to price their product, and even when to fund-raise and when to bootstrap their ven-ture. Especially for first time founders, the lack of experience in juggling all these uncertainties is very similar to a new professor’s dilemma. Uncertainty is the thing that makes entrepreneur-ship so hard, one never knows if the product will succeed in the market or even whether the area where the com-pany focuses its engineering efforts is the most critical for the business at the moment. For example, a business model that achieves the maximum short-term financial gain may not be the most optimal for the company long-term. Indeed, faster growth at the expense of smaller short-term finan-cial returns may enable larger finan-cial returns in the future. It is similar to the dilemma a young professor may face: Problems in established research areas might be more likely to be fund-ed, but less likely to make an impact in the field long-term.

Being able to make hard calls in spite of the extreme uncertainty is only part of a successful execution to-ward your vision. Often, the more dif-ficult part of the execution is convinc-

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ing others of the importance of your mission and the viability of your solu-tion. It is most ironic that computer scientists are never taught how to sell, yet both computer science professors and entrepreneurs have to be good salesmen. Professors sell their ideas and their research to the academic community, whereas entrepreneurs sell their product to the consumers. Professors try to convince funding agencies to fund their research pro-posals, whereas entrepreneurs try to convince venture capitalists to fund their companies. Entrepreneurs have to sell their product and team to po-tential hires, faculty members have to sell their research agenda to the grad-uate students looking to join their group. To illustrate this argument, imagine for a second being a first-year faculty member at Stanford trying to convince a stellar graduate student to choose you over Don Knuth (say, 20 years ago, when Don Knuth was still advising students). This is the same challenge that entrepreneurs face every single day trying to convince engineers to choose their company over Google or Facebook. If you don’t have a convincing story for why people should fund you, buy your product, read your papers, or join your team, you are unlikely to be successful.

As a side note, it is important to point out that public speaking is a big component of selling. Both for an entrepreneur and a faculty member, giving concise, entertaining presenta-tions is extremely important. A young faculty member typically gives about 20, hour-long presentations per year. Here, an entrepreneur actually has it harder; during a typical fundrais-ing cycle an entrepreneur may give up to 40, hour-long presentations to investors. So if you want to be either an entrepreneur or a professor, learn Keynote’s or PowerPoint’s shortcuts by heart and get very comfortable with public speaking; shyness in public is not considered charming.

A good salesman is not only a good storyteller and presenter, but also a great networker. Networking ulti-mately gets you more exposure to sell your vision and articulate your solu-tions. Networking is key for building an international reputation for young

professors. Professors must travel to give seminars, colloquium, and also go to conferences and workshops. Ev-erywhere they go, they need to meet with people, socialize, and be able to give a one-minute elevator pitch of their research agenda. Similarly, an entrepreneur has to attend various investor mixers, engineering mixers, and startup social events. Sometimes, an entrepreneur may even get invited to serve on a panel or serve as a judge. But regardless of where they are invit-ed and who the attendees are, an en-trepreneur must always be proactive at meeting people, socializing, and building relationships. Networking is often about helping others with ad-vice or introductions. These relation-ships can later lead to investors and potential recruits. This is very similar to the rewards young professors get through networking, namely success-ful grants and finding good students and research collaborators.

A big factor for networking for us was our participation in StartX, the Stanford startup accelerator (see page 40). StartX is a great community for Stanford entrepreneurs. We met a lot of current and former Stanford stu-dents who had a similar academic-focused mindset and were new to entrepreneurship. It was through net-working at StartX that we also met many of our investors. We would make connections with investors who came to give talks, attend dinners and mix-ers, and even host office hours. By ef-fective networking, we raised our seed round of financing from top Silicon Valley investors and became close friends with many successful Stanford entrepreneurs. Reputations and rela-

tionships are what make Silicon Valley such a great community.

Reading through this, you might get a false impression that entrepre-neurship is all about being a great salesman. This contrasts with the typical life of professors who spend most of their time doing research and often doing arguably the least fun part of research: writing grant appli-cations and reviewing and writing pa-pers. Where is the grind of entrepre-neurship? The truth of the matter is entrepreneurship is a lot less lustrous than they portray it in “The Social Network.” As a founder of startup, to execute your big mission, you work 100-hour weeks and you must keep going at this rate for at least a couple of years. It’s not a sprint, it’s a mara-thon. Out of these 100 hours, writing code is actually the most fun part of your job. A good chunk of your time is actually spent on mundane things like accounting, preparing an execu-tive summary for your investors, or taking care of employee health in-surance. But if you take a step back, this life is not too far from the life of a young faculty member. Between writing papers, endless traveling to seminars and conferences, teach-ing classes, and meeting students, a young professor would be lucky to get 60–70 hours of rest each week.

A big part of the long hours for startup founders and faculty is person-nel management. You cannot execute alone. You need a team who shares your vision, be it your research agenda or a specific market need. For entre-preneurs, having a great team behind you means having to go through piles of resumes, spending entire days inter-viewing candidates, and, once you fi-nally find somebody worth hiring, you still have to convince them to join you. This is surprisingly similar to the ex-perience faculty might have with post-docs, graduate students, and technical stuff (admin assistants, system ad-mins, researchers). Being able to hire great people is important because you need to trust your team to execute the same way a professor has to trust her students to do their work.

Once somebody comes on board, you have to be a good manager: provide training, mentorship, and deal with

A startup typically tries to address a need in the market because there are no tools to satisfy the need or the existing tools are suboptimal.

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on the company’s performance, first employees often have a lot of say in the company and eventually start running their own subteams.

As a founder of a startup, you are empowering your founding employ-ees to build their own teams within your company. You are scaling your organization the same way a profes-sor grows his academic tree branch: Your academic children (advisees) are responsible for the upbringing of your academic grandchildren, spreading the seeds of your research. These first employees often become successful entrepreneurs themselves. A classic example here is Paypal. Its found-ers and early employees, now known as the “Paypal mafia,” have started companies like LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Geni, Yammer, and Tesla Mo-tors; made a ton of early investments together; and created hugely success-ful companies. This is exactly why startups could and should be able to recruit much better talent than the big companies. A startup is an envi-ronment of rapid growth for the in-dividuals passionate about the same mission. The sky is the limit as they become future leaders, and although they have 10 times as much responsi-bility they have a thousand times as much potential reward.

Now that we’ve seen that building a research lab is so similar to run-ning a startup, can startups learn anything from academia? The ability to think clearly is probably the most important lesson you can learn from

people’s individual quirks in delicate ways. Part of personnel management is balancing between being friends with people and getting work done—some-times you need to encourage people, sometimes you may need to put on the pressure. Figuring out an ideal manage-ment style that yields the most optimal results is important for both faculty and entrepreneurs. Last but not least, along with hiring and daily management, there is the touchy subject of letting go of people. Sometimes, a professor may find the work style of a student does not match their work style and they may de-cide to discontinue working together. In a similar spirit, an entrepreneur has to deal with people leaving their jobs or sometimes they may need to fire some-body. These are both tough situations with which neither of us ever dealt with before starting a company.

Let’s bring the analogy between building a startup and starting a re-search lab full circle. When a Ph.D. graduate joins a research university as a young faculty member, she is in exactly the same position as an entre-preneur starting a company: There is nobody else but the founder/profes-sor on the team, there is probably no funding, and the research ideas may still be fuzzy. Over time, the profes-sor starts applying for grants, gets funding, adds graduate students to the team, and papers start getting published—there is a clear trajecto-ry for the research. It goes the same way for a startup: The founder brings more people to the team, they further develop their technology, get fund-ing, and start getting the company’s first customers.

Now you may wonder: In academia, Ph.D. students graduate after five years, is there anything analogous for entrepreneurs? Indeed, graduate stu-dents are like the first employees of a startup. Like the founding employees of a startup, Ph.D. students are usu-ally given a lot of say. By the time they graduate, they eventually start run-ning their own research projects with-in the lab and leave to become faculty themselves or independent research scientists at places like MSR or Google. Founding team members are the same way: The team is so small that indi-vidual performance has a big influence

In both academia and startups, the problems you tackle define your purpose and mission. For a young professor, your mission is your research agenda. For a startup, your mission is solving a specific market need.

academia. This ability is important for almost anything you do, but is es-pecially critical for entrepreneurship. A Ph.D. teaches you how to think in-dependently and have a clear mind-set when approaching problems. We were lucky to have Ph.D. advisers who gave us freedom in our research, that freedom helped us develop that clar-ity of thinking. Passion for interest-ing problems and clever solutions, the ability to work independently, persis-tence at finding solutions, and an abil-ity to abstract out a complex problem into a small tractable model are the qualities from our Ph.D. experience that other entrepreneurs may not possess. People who leave academia often forget about the rigorousness and precision of academia, but when applied correctly, rigor is a great tool to have in one’s hands when tackling problems in industry. Problems will seem simpler and solutions will come naturally, only if you can reason about a problem with a clear mindset.

For those of you who are consider-ing pursuing an entrepreneurship ca-reer path, our advice is to follow your heart. Sometimes certain things just feel right. If you feel passionate about something and feel like you could change the world, you should not be afraid. Drop whatever you’re doing and start this journey—the opportuni-ty may not come back. It won’t be easy. There will be a lot of obstacles along the way and sometimes it will feel ex-hausting, but the impact you might make will be far more reaching than if you shy away from the opportunity. Once you take that path, never look back. You have very little time to earn your tenure.

Biographies

Eldar Sadikov is CEo and co-founder of Jetlore Inc. and is currently on leave from the Ph.d. program in computer science at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Sadikov conducted research in Web search and data mining. He is published in top-tier computer science conferences and had short stints at google and Microsoft research working on Web search.

Montse Medina is Coo and co-founder of Jetlore Inc. and is currently on leave from the Ph.d. program in computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Medina completed research in parallel computing and data mining with publications in top-tier computer science venues. She has also previously worked at oracle in text search.

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