Logic and Passion: My path to Entrepreneurship

I have always known exactly what I wanted to do with my career – transform scientific discovery into products that change lives. This is why I choose engineering as an undergraduate, rather than the basic sciences, and why my graduate research was application driven.

As an undergraduate I quickly learned that I could accomplish this goal inside or outside academia. As an academic I could follow the path pioneered by the likes of MIT professor Robert Langer who has co-authored over 1,000 articles, co-invented over 750 patents and patent applications, licensed or sublicensed his work to over 220 companies, and founded over 20 successful companies. In industry, I could follow the path of those like Craig Venter, co-founder of Celera Genomics and Synthetic Genomics. Thus, the potential was there to reach my goal irrespective of path.

As a result, the choice of academia versus industry was not based on where I wanted to ultimately end up, but rather, which path I wanted to take to get there.

The academic path would start with the ubiquitous postdoc position. Although I knew that this was a necessary next step to my professional development and part of “paying your dues” - become an expert in a second area of research, advise graduate students and hone your grant writing skills – for me, personally, I was less than enthusiastic about the day-to-day realities of this position. In addition, as I entered my late 20’s I was growing weary of “living like a graduate student”. The ~$35k salary that I was likely to earn as a post-doc in the New York metro area would only perpetuate that feeling. These perceptions were reinforced and primarily created by the postdocs that I had regular contact with as an undergraduate and graduate student. However, I like to think of myself as an extremely disciplined person who is always willing to forgo a simple pleasure today to reach the ultimate goal tomorrow. Thus, if this is what it would have taken to reach my goal I would have done it.

But there was more. In the second half of the last century, tenure track positions at major research universities were arguably a growth industry. There was a time when high-achieving postdocs or even graduate students could choose between offers. Times have changed. Speaking with postdocs who were desperately trying to break into tenure track academic positions, I heard stories about the need to complete a minimum of 2-3 postdoc tours over a minimum of 6 years due to the abundance of candidates and the lack of positions. After all of this, the stories went, if you were lucky enough to get an offer, you took it no matter where that University happened to be located and no matter how little your significant other wanted to live there. Finally, once you obtained one of these coveted positions, the professors that I worked with continually lamented the lack of funding and how it had become much more difficult for newly minted PI’s to establish their independence.

If your goal is to compete and achieve at the highest level of any profession then you cannot be worried about hard work and having to prove yourself and demonstrate that you stand out from among the crowd. That said, to maintain the extreme level of dedication required for excellence, you need to be passionate about the details and not just the big picture.  

Unlike the academic path, I found that the first step on the industrial/entrepreneurial path had options. Opportunities were available to a) work for a company that had supported my graduate research and potentially continue my work, b) work in a management training program at a major pharmaceutical company that would rotate me through multiple positions in multiple locations, while learning the ropes of all phases of product development, or c) work at a start-up biotech company and learn what it takes to be an entrepreneur. In truth, these jobs also carried the title of postdoc, but at salaries that were closer to $100k than $35k. Importantly, the management training program and the start-up position provided not only a chance to hone the skills I had developed as a graduate student, but also required that I learn and develop new patent, financial, management, and product development skills that I would need as a future entrepreneur. For better or worse, my time line for reaching my ultimate goal would be governed by my ability to make it happen, rather than a system of unwritten rules. For example, I may not have to do multiple postdocs and impress a faculty selection committee, but I would ultimately need to impress a panel of investors to make my dreams a reality.

After all of this analysis, my decision on whether to enter industry or academia came down to simple logic and a basic human emotion. I decided to take the postdoc position at the start-up company because this position presented the most direct route to my career goals and it excited me like none of the other options did. As stated previously, to maintain the extreme level of dedication required for excellence you need to be passionate about the details and not just the big picture.