PhD and entrepreneurship

Are you doing a PhD, finished it, or thinking of doing one?

Have you been wondering what to do after academic life?

You might think that you need to continue in academia now that you have vested your time on that career path. Otherwise, PhD studies was wasted years in your life.

On the contrary.

Doing a PhD is great. You learn so many things. Besides patience, resilience and humility, you can learn project management, leadership, mentoring skills, organizational skills and much more. You learn to manage one multi-year project and write an extensive final report. You learn to be analytical, critical, objective, creative and persuasive. These skills are in high demand everywhere.

It does not matter what you do after your PhD, it has surely given you skills that you can use everywhere you go. I learned a vast number of skills during my academic skills that were easily transferrable to the private sector where I relocated. These skills are also extremely helpful in ‘real life’.

When we think entrepreneurship, we might think of inventing a new vaccine or drug for treatment of a disease. However, there are more ways to look at it. You can also turn your hobby or passion into entrepreneurship.

I’ll give you an example of four people who did just that and were even able to maintain the shred (or more) of academia in there.

Andrew Rhodes started brewing kombucha tea during his PhD just for taste and fun and found success in something when PhD was not going as smooth as it should have been. When he was finishing his PhD, he and his wife opened a brewery for making kombucha. Later he got an academic teaching job and is juggling both careers and loving it.

Richard Preiss is a microbiologist who during his studies got interested in yeast that is a key component of making beer. He and his colleagues approached local breweries and found that they were interested in the opportunity to get their yeast locally, not imported. They later founded a company that supplies yeast for industry and home brewers.

J Nikol Jackson-Beckham got interested in beer making already as undergraduate and during her PhD she was working in stores that sell brewing kits. She did her PhD in beer and later after a few years in academia, became an entrepreneur in the beer industry and keeps educating people.

Andrew Strang is a physicist who bakes bread. He invented a love for baking bread during his PhD and started selling it to friends and delivering it by bike. He found the bakery business irresistible and founded Bread by bike in London with his friends and made it to flourishing business where they deliver bread to restaurants, cafes and bars.

All these people say how much academic life prepared them for entrepreneurship and I totally agree. I have often heard people in industry saying they do not want academics because they are too theoretical and narrow-minded, but they are so wrong in that.

What better teaches you to face challenges of juggling various work areas than academic life. Academia where you need to do research, present your data to lay people, colleagues and funders, supervise students and write articles, apply funding and learn to negotiate how to collaborate for best results.

Naturally, these are success stories. But we all have a chance of doing the same. We just need to have passion for something and the we need to put in the hard work.

The hard work part is where most people fail. These things do not just happen to someone. They need to be made with a lot of hard work and many times a lot of risk taking.

You can start with a small side hustle. Then if it goes well, continue expanding. This blog is the prelude to my side hustle. I have plans for the future, although everything goes forward in such baby steps when working full-time, being a new grandparent and renovating a house!