Scientists Should Start Companies - Matt Krisiloff
It seems amongst many scientists that the idea of starting a company is still looked down upon. Many seem to imagine companies as entities for which one must give up their principles and the possibility to pursue the most interesting work.
But done right, that doesn’t need to be the case at all. A good company can actually be a superior vector for pursuing the most impactful research.
If more scientists adopted the model of starting research companies, I think we would see many more transformational technologies come to exist than we currently do. I believe many kinds of basic research questions would be explored at a faster rate too.
I like to think of companies as social organization tools first and foremost, where people can be optimally aligned towards working on a hard problem.
In academia, most scientists are incentivized to work on their own research in a relatively siloed fashion – publications are an all-important currency that is hard to be shared.
