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What to focus on during your PhD?Experience from working in a start-up

Cristian KleinResearcher

Department of Computing Science Umeå University

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About me

• 2009–2012: PhD at INRIA, France– On HPC

• 2013–2014: post-doc at Umeå University– On cloud

• 2015: chief cloud architect and executive at SimScale, Germany– HPC on cloud

• 2016: back as researcher at Umeå University

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Dooms march to defense

Academia IndustryXOR(Teaching)

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A more colorful worldAcademia Industry

Do hands-on stuff ✔ ✔Lead ✔ ✔Supervise ✔ ✔Teach ✔ ✔Write ✔ ✔Read ✔ ✔Analyze ✔ ✔Project Management ✔ ✔Sell ✔ ✔Talk ✔ ✔

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Technological Readiness Level

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The chaos, impact trade-off

Established environments• Good procedures• Clear responsibilities• Clear task assignments• Sloooooooow• Lot of effort to change

Young environments• Chaos• Chaos• Chaos• Fast(er)• Easier to change

Early start-ups(Entrepreneur)

Big industries Intrapreneur

Potential for impact

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Start-ups

“organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”

Not to develop a product, but find out what product to develop

High risk! (“No risk, no reward”)

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Where do you come?

• Founder– Lots of equity– Little salary

• Key employee (<20)– Some equity– Reasonable salary

• Other employee

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Lean Startup and Validated Learning

Measure

Build

Learn

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More details …1. Formulate business hypothesis:– “There is a need for this product.”– “People will pay for such a product.”– “This feature will increase sales.”

2. Design an experiment (min. viable product):– YouTube movie (Dropbox)– Single-human (precursor to Linas Matkasse)– Mock– Small-scale prototype– A/B test

3. Perform experiment and collect data4. Analyze data => learn and get actionable insight

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The most important hypothesis

• Value hypothesis:– “This product brings value to customers.”

• Growth hypothesis:– “More and more customers will join.”

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PhD and start-up = h

• PhD studies incubate new ideas• Start-ups: final TRLs of ideas

• PhD studies teach risk management• Start-ups: high risk

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Some Tips• Take advice with a grain of salt

– It is your career!• Maintain job and opportunity awareness

– LinkedIn– Workshops– Orthogonal courses: recruitment, entrepreneurship, …

• Remember soft skills:– Teaching– Presenting– Managing a project– Collaborating– Writing– Independence– Analytic thinking

• Don’t be shy!