[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.