[nostrademons]

Yeah, but it's not really an equal comparison. You can start a startup with a bachelor's degree (or less...) and a couple years of work experience. You need about 6 years of grad school, 2-3 years of postdoccing, and 6 years as a tenure-track professor to become a tenured professor. Assuming you aren't weeded out at any one of those stages. Your chances of getting tenure at the end of this are quite a bit lower than the chance that your startup will succeed, given equal intelligence and effort.

A better comparison would be startup founder <=> grad student, cashed-out entrepreneur <=> tenured professor. Startup founders tend to have more freedom than grad students, and multimillionaires tend to have more freedom than tenured professors.

[pixcavator]

"Your chances of getting tenure at the end of this are quite a bit lower than the chance that your startup will succeed, given equal intelligence and effort."

You are way off! Just count the number of multimillionaire founders vs. tenured professors.

[nostrademons]

Count the number of people who attempt to start a (tech) startup and compare with the number of people who go to grad school. You've gotta apply Bayes's rule: P(success) = P(good outcome) / P(trying), not just P(good outcome).

Unfortunately, I can't use my personal experience as a reliable count, since I went to college and live in the educational capital of the world (Massachusetts). It also happens to be a startup hub, and I hang around with lots of startup founders. So both my count of tenured professors and my count of successful entrepreneurs are likely to be distorted.

Anyone have actual numbers we could use to perform the computation? We need the number of students entering grad school, the number of new technology firms started, the number of tenured professors in the U.S, and the number of multi-million-$ acquisitions and IPOs.