Challenges Doing a PhD and a Startup

In 2007, my 3 co-founders and I started AccelerEyes. We were all PhD students in the same computer vision lab at Georgia Tech. The impetus for AccelerEyes grew out of a side project and was not directly related to our PhD research.

The startup started small with little required time-commitment and slowly grew in importance over the first 8 months of the business.  During that time we built an initial alpha version of our product, demoed it at research conferences, and refined our business plan. The business plan refinement was especially easy due to my involvement in the TI:GER program. With encouragement from the TI:GER program, we participated in and won the 2008 Georgia Tech Business Plan Competition. By that time, we found ourselves needing to strike a good balance between our PhD research and our startup.

Winning that competition kicked off a very tough moment for our startup. The publicity caused several in our academic circle to become concerned about our startup. They were primarily worried about the startup becoming a distraction from our PhD studies. We were pressured to stop involvement with the startup.

Adding to the pressure, we had used a handful of images we had generated for our PhD research to be eye candy on our business website. Using those images led to us having to answer questions about if we were using lab code (“No”) and if we were commercializing medical imaging stuff from the lab (“No”). Having dispelled the misconceptions, we were left with needing to make clear steps to move forward with balance.

Admittedly, it is true that doing a startup at the same time as a PhD is sub-optimal for both efforts. But we were prepared to do both, and we worked a ridiculous number of hours those years to do as much as we could on both. There is no requirement in PhD programs that students work exclusively on their PhD studies. In fact, the school policy is to put in a cap of 20 hours (called “half-time”, see quote at the bottom of this post) per week for graduate student work. Despite the official 20 hour cap, the near universal expectation is that grad students will devote full focus to their studies.

Our success with our startup caused us to want to break the spirit of the “full focus” universal expectation and allocate more of our spare time to our business.

In any case, we believed in what we were doing and were not dissuaded. We took a number of steps to stay clear of future problems, some of which were very financially burdensome, including:

• Obtaining a waiver of intellectual property rights from Georgia Tech, through a formal invention disclosure process
• Refusing any future payments for our PhD work at Georgia Tech, instead we worked for Georgia Tech for free and paid ourselves from the proceeds of our startup (very expensive)
• Paying our own tuition at Georgia Tech, rejecting the tuition waiver that most ECE and CS grad students enjoy (very expensive)
• Taking a leave of absence in the summer of 2008 to do an internship for ourselves

It was hard and extra complicated to do a startup as PhD students; but, in the end, we were able to work through the tough moment and move forward. We are grateful to those in our academic circle that helped lead to the resolution and were patient and lenient with us in this process.

Do you have stories of challenges starting a company as a student?

“Each student receiving a graduate assistantship is expected to assist faculty either with sponsored research or instruction. The student must be classified as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) or a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA), as defined in “Policy Guidelines: Academic, Administrative and Financial Administration of Graduate Assistantships,” quoted in Appendix 1 of this document. E. Per the policy on hour loads cited in item one above, each graduate assistant, as a fulltime student, is expected to work at least one-third time (13 hours per week), but no more than one-half time (20 hours per week).” –Georgia Tech Policy on Minimum Stipends Section II.D.

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