I’m leaving the University of Michigan School of Information PhD program after this semester. It’s been a great two years, and I’m very grateful for the STIET fellowship that’s supported me. At SI, I’ve been surrounded by people who think deeply about technology not for its own sake, but for how it affects our lives and our culture. I’ve gotten the chance to take courses on everything from recommender systems to methods in experimental economics, not to mention the wonderful first-year micro and game theory sequence at the UMich Econ department. I got to present a short paper at the HCOMP conference in Paris last summer. And I’ve had the honor of serving on the Faculty Search Committee, helping to decide who the school will hire from an extremely talented pool of applicants. So this is not a decision I’ve made lightly. It is, however, one I’m sure of.
When I first came here, I liked to tell people that in five years I’d be an absent-minded professor, most likely of Economics. My advisor helped me to find novel areas of research, and I started perusing the literature and creating theoretical models. But I soon found that I was much more excited about building stuff that people could actually use than I was about writing academic papers. Last summer, when I built a social bookmarking app called Quocial (now defunct), I thought the two interests could co-exist. Since then, though, I’ve gradually reached the conclusion that the optimal allocation of my time is 100% software development, 0% academic stuff. Which means leaving grad school and seeking funding for my dream: To create an amazing, web-based alternative to STATA.
Now, of course I don’t expect to attract investors on the basis of my idea alone. (What do you think this is, the 1990s?) To quote a trope that’s rightly permeated the startuposphere: “Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. Execution is worth millions.” And I know I’m not the only one who’s had this idea. Someone posted a rough prototype to Hacker News just two weeks ago that was very similar in concept, in fact.
Fortunately, I have more than just the idea. I have two amazing SI Master’s students as teammates, Noah Liebman and Tom Haynes. We call ourselves Theoryville. We’ve been meeting since November to flesh out the concept and do some basic market research, and we’ve recently started pitching our idea around.
Today we got a nice call from Harj Taggar, founder of Auctomatic and currently a part of Y Combinator, asking us some informal questions about our application. One of the things he encouraged us to do was to build a demo before it comes time for him and the rest of the Y Combinator folks to pick finalists. Coincidentally, I’d told my team the same thing earlier this week: We need a demo. We need to show that we can execute.
And that’s the story so far: Leaving grad school. Two weeks to show that my team has the potential to turn our idea into a useful, slick-looking app this summer. No pressure.
Just learned that you decided to leave the program. My best wishes to your future career!