[_delirium]

Out of curiosity, does anyone know how academic positions are counted in these numbers? Are the Google founders counted as having been previously employed in tech, for example? (They had paid PhD research positions at Stanford CS, but never worked in "regular" tech jobs in industry.)

[analog31]

In my observation, academic research shares a lot in common with entrepreneurship. Stealing from nostrademons above:

>>>> Working for someone else's startup, I learned how to quickly cobble solutions together. I learned about uncertainty and picking a direction regardless of whether you're sure it'll work. I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along. I learned a lot of basic technical skills, how to write code quickly and learn new APIs quickly and deploy software to multiple machines. I learned how quickly problems of scaling a development team crop up, and how early you should start investing in automation. <<<<

I pretty much experienced all of those things in the course of my PhD research, with the exception of forming teams.

[Xodarap]

Generally researchers identify industries by using a code system like [NAICS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Industry_Classif...). My guess is that the Google founders would not have been in a similar industry code, but I'm not familiar enough with Stanford to say for sure.