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the CEO and say sorry. In a big company, you can't do that, so it becomes
more of navigating those waters and understanding how to play that game.
Though a different structure, it was still an important challenge for the team
and me. I think we pulled it off successfully, as evidenced by the fact that most
of the team is still around even after the one-year mark.
Gutierrez:
What does your typical day look like now that you do research?
Jonas:
I wake up most mornings and go to Philz Coffee, where I sit and code
or read papers for a couple of hours. These days I'm trying even harder
than ever to aggressively defend large blocks of time. I've discovered that if
I want to get anything technical done, I need a four-hour contiguous block.
Otherwise, work just doesn't get done. Even just one 15-minute phone call
can totally mess that up.
It's been a bit of a struggle being an independent researcher without an admin
or a team to work with. I come home and—like, wow—the accounting paper-
work isn't all magically done for me. So the big challenge for me right now is
trying to figure out how to be technically productive while still getting admin
tasks done. Similarly, travel also gets in the way of being technically productive.
For instance, I'm going back to MIT next week. The week after that there's the
workshop that we're running at the COSYNE conference. Then two weeks
after that there's a machine learning conference in Iceland and then one in
Copenhagen. It's just so easy to have all these little things kind of eat away
at your time as you're trying to be technically productive. I think that's often
why in academia, graduate students and postdocs do all the real work. There's
no way that a principal investigator, given all of their responsibilities, could
possibly ever sit down and do real technical work.
Gutierrez:
How did you view and measure success as a PhD student?
Jonas:
“Poorly” is the most honest answer I can give. I've yet to meet a gradu-
ate student who doesn't make the mistake of confusing inputs with outputs,
especially in the experimental sciences. We think that because we're there
at nine in the morning and stay until midnight, where we sit in front of a
computer all day, and maybe even actually coding instead of hitting reload on
Reddit or Hacker News, that we're being productive. We work very hard and
think that's successful. We say things like, “I haven't slept in 48 hours!” And
everyone's like, “Ooooh.” There's this tendency to think that's the metric that
matters as opposed to the number of papers you write or how close are you
to actually graduating. So in grad school, I didn't have the best view or mea-
sure of success.
Gutierrez:
How did you view and measure success as a startup CEO?
Jonas:
Fortunately, in industry, especially in startup world, people won't let
you get away with that view or measure of success. If you have a smart group
