Einar Volsett

It was a sort of continuation after my PhD.

I did really well at my PhD.

And so I got a visiting assistant professorship at Cornell.

So I was like, great, this is a stepping stone to,

whatever.

I, like I said, I didn't really think about it at a very holistic level.

It just, this is the next step.

And it was obviously prestigious and it was obviously like very similar to graduating middle school with a, or graduating high school with a great grades and getting into an amazing college.

It was very similar.

Because I realized that a bunch of tenure-track professors are really miserable.

And even the ones who are tenured, they don't seem that happy.

Most of the time, and there are exceptions, but a lot of the time, what you end up doing as a professor, like a tenured professor, is you don't actually... People get into academia.

The piece I liked was doing actual research and coming up with new things and testing them out and seeing.

But if you actually become a tenured professor, you don't actually do very much of that.

Most of the time, and here's my recipe for becoming a successful professor, be amazing at writing grants.

That's basically the main job.

People underestimate, particularly in the US, but also elsewhere, how similar being a professor is to being a venture-backed startup founder.

Because essentially what you're doing all the time is going out, grabbing money,

getting the best people and trying to get your projects, you know, financed, built and done or published in the case of academia.

So what happened to those people?