| I think you are mischaracterizing both startups and academic work. A few things to think about: -A Ph.D. usually often isn't the end point. If your end point is a tenured academic position, your odds are much, much worse than startup success -About 50% of Ph.D. students don't complete, ever. -"1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams" seems odd. Most people who succeed in startups succeed precisely in scope of most peoples dreams. There are outliers, sure, but they are exactly that. -You aren't scared of Google publishing before you - but in some areas you are justifiably scared of other people publishing before you and making your work unpublishable. You may know these people personally. -Academic work is often best characterized as being unfair and stressful -The 90%:10% statistic is just that, and you aren't really applying it meaningfully -Like companies, Ph.D.s aren't fungible |