Tell HN: Doing a PhD is good

Or having a higher education. A general trend here is to discard PhD/higher education as a waste of time or money when one want to go the startup way. Effectively, you can become rich without such education, but very few of them get really rich and on the barrier to entry, if you consider a field where you can be disruptive without education is rather low.

The real good point of having a PhD is not in the title you get, it is in the network you can build and the problems you try to solve. By definition, most of the scientific PhD are to solve industrial problems. This means, you have a complex problem and customers, directly, right now, during your studies.

If you are smart, you can already have a portfolio of customers at the end of your PhD, you can have your product nearly ready and you will be able to charge your customers more in thousands of Dollars than in $9 per month.

Bonus point, the barrier to entry will be high for the competition and it is relatively easy to become an expert in your field.

So please, if you want to do a PhD, do it and do it wisely.

A short list to think about:

1. Get a supervisor known to give his students a lot of freedom. 2. Do your PhD in a country where you get a good pay (most of the EU countries pay well for a PhD). 3. Go in a university with a good budget for travel to conferences. 4. Find labs with intensive industrial collaboration.