A Difference Between University and Startup Mentality
It seems like I’ve been writing a version of this email once every two weeks all summer, so it is time to commit it to the blog. This post is for students and professors in academia (not a business school) that are trying to communicate to me what their business is doing. It is relevant to Fall CS 5150 students engaged in the joint Entrepreneurship / Computer Science program.
When you work in an interdisciplinary program (and you have some notion of the definition of successful communication), you quickly realize that academic fiefdoms speak very different languages and, therefore, communication between them is more difficult than you might expect. Students are expected to learn to mimic the communication protocols of their instructors (regardless of how efficient they are) and this is one of the primary standards for whether students are judged as successful (whether they receive high grades). Since this post isn’t really a commentary on this situation, I won’t dwell on it. This backdrop is important because when students leave the nest of the university and enter the business world, the communication paradigm changes completely (because the vast majority of people in academia have little business success and the vast majority of people in business have little academic success).
Despite the illusion of precision in methods, these communication problems translate into an immediate problem for a student (or faculty member) entering the work force (or vice versa). People need to understand what you are trying to tell them. Ironically, because business people interact so frequently across a broad range of skill sets, a lot of the terminology in business seems more standardized (more commonly understood and frequently defined the same way) than it is in academia. As a business person, I am not willing to read 10 pages of nonsense to understand that you are trying to invent a new term to replace the phrase “capitalization table” in a startup as it applies to your type of business. (Note that this doesn’t mean that cap tables are standardized. It just means that it is difficult to function in an executive position and not know what a cap table is.)
Back to the situation at hand. You are a student/faculty member and you are trying to start a business. Step 1 is to have an idea. Step 2 is to learn to communicate it effectively to someone else. The simplest way that I can break down how to do that is to ask you to answer three questions:
- What are the two most critical experiments that you need to run to determine whether your idea may uncover “something important”?
- If the experiments go well, how would you characterize the “something important” from question 1?
- What is the cost of the team and resources to conduct these experiments (per month and for the duration of the experiments)? (in your answer, you must address how much buffer you have for unexpected problems)
The combination of the answers to these questions form the basis for the hiring plan for a business team, the budget for their work, the product positioning statement, and the problem they are attacking. I cannot stress how critical the answers are to understanding the scope and focus of a team. These questions actually have a parallel in academia, but the expectations for the answers are (in my experience) strikingly different.
If you are a student in academia, there is an expectation that you can link your work to the research interests of others, past and present. When you cite theorems, related work and established methods, you are positioning your work inside of a research paradigm. Similarly, when you build a business you situate your enterprise in the landscape of related companies, past and present, and the market trends that people believe in. In the startup world, each company (failed or successful) is an experiment. Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs learn the experiments associated with different startups and the outcomes. This learning is similar to the ability to conduct and communicate a literature review in academia.
A second parallel between academia and business exists in experiment selection. Similar to higher quality entrepreneurs and business leaders, higher quality PhD students, faculty, and program administrators at NSF/NIST/etc. give solid advice about “useful” experiment selection. The definition of “useful” experiment selection itself deserves an entire blog post, but an important distinction between academia and business is the definition of useful experiment. A useful experiment in business is, at its core, one that can lead to a profitable revenue stream. In academia, successful experiments have a definition that is dependent upon the academic domain’s norms and standards, which are set by the ruling political class of the domain. Understanding your domain’s political ruling class and norms/standards is always a key gauge of success. Students prove this by graduating. Faculty prove this by having papers accepted and grants approved. Business leaders demonstrate this by getting funding for their projects.
As I stated in the introduction, this post is for students and professors in academia that are trying to communicate to me the primary activities of their business. You are trying to move into a world that has a different communication paradigm and different political values. You must adapt to it because, unless you are a super nova superstar, it will not adapt to you. If you don’t understand the paradigm, have some humility and ask. The advice may cost money and you get what you pay for.
