Why PhDs make bad entrepreneurs (on average)
But why they rock at certain aspects of entrepreneurship
“Wow Jeroen, such a controversial title. You little rascal.”
I just returned from running workshops for a PhD Startup Accelerator program at the Technical University of Munich.
I noticed something interesting here. PhDs are outliers in three aspects of entrepreneurship compared to other groups I’ve taught.
Understanding this will help you to become a better leader in your startup.
By now, I’ve taught about startups and entrepreneurship to people with a variety of educational careers:
Urban Mobility PhDs & Medical Research PhDs
Master Students from Biology to Physics to Engineer to MBAs
3rd Year Bachelor Students of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Maths and so on
Fresh students (age 17-18)
When I was in Munich, this time something I noticed about PhDs compared to other groups.
PhDs excel in three aspects
The speed at which the participants understood frameworks and concepts
The speed at which they were able to apply the frameworks to their case
The ease at which they can assess evidence in their startups
In my years of teaching, I’ve seen a variety of pace in which people can pick up concepts.
The higher the intelligence, the quicker they absorb the concepts.
The higher the intelligence, the more abstract concepts can be in general.
The higher the intelligence, the easier they grasp the spectrum that travels from hypothesis to knowledge.
Example: I’ve often used my customer-problem fit framework in workshops. It helps to identify problem urgency. It’s a simple framework, everyone usually understands it.
But what I noticed with this group, is the speed at which they started to use the framework itself in their own language, for themselves.
This stood out to me. I’ve worked with classes where I required 5 weeks to get some simple concepts in to land, such as ‘what is a problem’ to begin with, or the idea of risky assumptions from the Lean Startup approach.
So PhDs are the best entrepreneurs?
Well, no. PhDs (or researchers) are among the general population probably the best at understanding concepts, transferring knowledge to their context, and assessing evidence.
Therefore, these aspects of entrepreneurship come easy to them.
But, many stereotypes of researchers are true: they shy away from reaching out to customers before knowing everything about your startup.
They tend to want to analyse everything upfront. They are less market opportunity driven, in my experience, to let’s say, business students.
The selection process that is life probably has filtered out the entrepreneurs from PhD programs. I’ve heard this more often than not from people tasked with getting researchers to market their innovations: researches just don’t care about the market.
They care about their research, not a market opportunity. Does this mean that there are no PhDs that are entrepreneurial or launch businesses? Of course not.
But among the general population of PhDs, I would expect them to favour research opportunities over market opportunities.
Being super smart is one thing, but enacting your opportunity is what makes entrepreneurship work.
I’m a founder, why should I care about this?
Because as a founder, you often need new personnel or co-founders to understand certain concepts. Understanding which aspects influence the speed at which people can grasp concepts gives you more patience.
You probably have someone in your team right now who has extremely fast processing speed and can conceptualise pretty abstract things. However, some people need more time.
Adjust your communication to that. Don’t expect everyone in your team to contribute to everything. Some people are just not made for synthesising the big picture.
I’m a PhD, I feel hurt
This post is not addressed to anyone at that workshop, or any PhD. I appreciated all the energy from the PhDs during the Munich Workshop, which allowed me to make a more general reflection.
I’m generalising about PhDs, therefore oversimplifying. Some of the PhDs I’ve worked with were outgoing and opportunistic in a good sense. Here I’m just describing general tendencies in my experience.