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How to become an Entrepreneurial Scientist

How to become an Entrepreneurial Scientist

The 6 elements to get into the right research program if you dream of becoming a founder

Giammarco Pacifico & Federico Micol
October 25, 2023

Doing a PhD can be an incredible opportunity: you get to work for years on something you deeply care about and get to know top experts in the field, all while getting paid for learning.

During this period, you can deepen your knowledge and follow your intellectual curiosity on specific topics, with concrete chances that you will come up with something new and innovative after all the hard work.

But when you will finish, what will you do with all that knowledge?

The most reasonable decision is to follow the default path: continuing your academic career so that you’ll get more opportunities to work on similar projects.

However, the academic career market is much more competitive than you might think. And not many people know about it.

Estimates show that among the people who start a PhD, 30-35% continue with a Post-Doc, around 17% become junior faculty members, and less than 3% will become full professors. Ouch.

The second most common choice is to find a job in industry. The academic community often looks down on this as giving up to the “evil world of capitalism” instead of the “pure pursuit of knowledge”.

Although industry is a world that encompasses hundreds of different career options, it’s likely that you’ll end up working as a scientist in a big corporation or as a science-adjacent role in sales, marketing, consulting or product management.

Everyone who made this shift knows that any of these jobs will most likely make you forget most of the work you have done before, and direct your energy to different types of problems.

But what if the default paths are not the right choice for you?

Scientific progress was never meant to stay in the lab and increase your publishing credentials. Its primary goal was to discover and build something useful for society.

If you are deeply passionate about a problem or a technological field, there is a third way to leverage the knowledge you are developing: entrepreneurship.

Becoming an Entrepreneurial Scientist

Most people decide to start a PhD because of inertia. After finishing their graduate studies and being unsure of which path to take, they decide to accept what’s in front of them, which many times is an offer to enrol into a PhD program.

If your dream is to become a deep tech entrepreneur but you don’t know where to start and you don’t have a project or a tech to work on right now, a PhD could be the right path to become a founder.

It doesn’t matter if you have just finished your master's and you need to find a job or if you have worked a few years in a company and realized you miss the freedom of academia but are scared to enter an h-index race.

Approaching your PhD with the right entrepreneurial mindset might be the perfect spot for launching a company.

How to get into the right PhD program if you want to become a founder

This article will explain which are the key elements you should consider to make it happen.

Probably not surprisingly, the main ones are the professor and lab to do your Ph.D.

If you don’t wisely choose your professor, pursuing a PhD can make your life hard (if not miserable). To maximize your chances of embarking on the right journey, you must do your Reverse Due Diligence before applying or accepting any offer.

Universities, in fact, always do due diligence on you: they check your CV, your scientific track record, and your academic path and they speak with your previous professors/colleagues before making a decision. They are looking for someone who can maximize the department and lab's chances of reaching their goals.

So why not do the same, but in reverse?

Reverse Due Diligence

This is what a Reverse Due Diligence process for entrepreneurial labs might look like:

1. Knowledge

Make a list of the top professors in the field you are interested in. Note where they are located, with whom they collaborate, their path to professorship and what they are renowned for (e.g. industry collaboration, grants, etc).

Look for professors who have worked in private companies before getting a full-time chair or who are still actively working part-time with different types of companies. Avoid professors who only have advisory roles in associations or who have only worked in academia, going straight from PhD to PostDocs to Associate/Tenure Track Professor.

2. Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

Talk with other researchers working with the same professor. Ask them how they are treated. Do they make their life easier or miserable? What kind of incentives do they set for PhDs and collaborators? How do they measure “success” for their PhD students?

3. Industry collaborations

Make sure it’s common for the lab to get research contracts from multiple industry players. This speaks to how well the PI is connected with industry leaders, how strong their reputation is and if they are able to monetize their expertise outside of academia. Keep in mind that only by knowing the current challenges of the industry, they would be able to know what kind of research will be most promising.

Look for professors who at any time have ongoing research contracts with private companies. This also means that every researcher in their lab is exposed to industry problems and can practically test their work in companies where the stakes are much higher.

4. Spin-outs

Check whether these professors have ever spun out any company from their lab. If not, you forget about that name. If yes, contact some of the companies and talk with the (co)founder about the role of the professor in the process.

Don’t be blindsided by an outlier success or a spin-out startup reaching unicorn status. Instead, focus on the translation process (both before and after incorporation) and the involvement of professors and other researchers.

If they are not actively collaborating with some spin-offs (no matter if they are from the same lab or not), chances are they know very little about startups.

5. Ecosystem support

Check whether the university has a technology transfer office (if you do not know what they do, you can check it here). Talk with them and understand how they have supported other founders during their journey (even better if it’s one of the founders from the same lab you spoke with before).

If they don’t have time to speak with you, forget about that university.

Check the local ecosystem: are there any investors linked to the university? Is there a large group of successful alumni who founded companies and are giving back to the university? Is there an incubator/accelerator specialized in the technologies you will work on? Are there business angels that can support you in the first phases of your journey? Are the best companies working in related areas nearby?

6. Personal development

Look for PhD courses and departments that support entrepreneurship education and interdisciplinary paths. Make sure these courses are taught by serial founders, former entrepreneurs or industry leaders.

If they make you stick to the courses they offer, not incentivizing you to broaden your perspectives, forget about that university. There are high chances that the mentality of the department is primarily focused on producing science, rather than facilitating its translation.

Learning how to differentiate bad, good and great is the first step to becoming an entrepreneur, as it also forces you to get out of your comfort zone and talk with people before making any decision.

Following this process, even if you don’t end up launching a startup from your research (or god forbid your startup fails), you’ll be much better off entering the workforce as someone who has learned what it takes to work on groundbreaking science while creating a company.

Most startups in your field will fight to have you as an early employee and even if you end up joining a large corporation, you’ll rise up the ladder much faster because you know much more than just tinkering in the lab.

Sounds surprising?

Research shows that if you tried to build a startup and failed, you will have better chances to get into better-paid jobs.

In the end, putting the analysis aside, choosing the right path is about working on cool things with people you like.

If you take care of this, everything else will follow.

This article has been developed in collaboration with Deep-Tech 4 Dummies, the online repository of entrepreneurial-related resources created to help scientists accelerate the development of their hard sciences projects and increase their impact on the world.
Have a look and support the project!

If you found this valuable, tell more people about the path of Entrepreneurial Scientists

This week's top scientific reads

Beyond AlphaFold for protein-X interactions (bioRxiv)
Spatial biology on the rise (bioRxiv)
How do cats purr? (Cell)
No-Vax for dogs (ScienceDirect - Vaccine)
Fixing imaging for black-skin people (ScienceDirect - Photoacoustic)

Read my comments on these articles here.

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