#2 Combining academia and entrepreneurship. Continuing the conversation with Prof. King at Harvard

Interview with Professor Gary King, Harvard University, on growing via academia and entrepreneurship.

In this interview, I continue talking with Gary King, the Weatherhead University Professor at Harvard University and the Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, now focusing on entrepreneurship. While in the previous conversation the focus was on pursuing academic excellence, in this talk Gary shares his experience in combining academic and entrepreneurial goals.

In terms of academic research, Gary and his research group develop and apply methods in many areas of social science research. He was elected President of the Society for Political Methodology and Vice President of the American Political Science Association. He has been a member of the Senior Editorial Board at Science, and several other journals. He has served on more than 30 editorial, nonprofit, and corporate boards. He has written more than 185 journal articles, 20 open-source software packages, and 8 books. Professor King is also a co-founder of several companies and holder of a set of patents.

Besides his academic research, Gary is a co-founder and an inventor of the original technology for Crimson Hexagon (merged with Brandwatch, acquired by Cision), Learning Catalytics (acquired by Pearson), Thresher (acquired by Two Six Technologies, a Carlyle Company), Perusall, OpenScholar, and QuickCode. He has received 17 patents for these technologies.

In this talk, he shares his experience on combing the best of two worlds: academia and entrepreneurship.

I hope you enjoy it!

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About me, the interviewer. At the time of producing this interview, I was an Associate Professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, and an
Affiliated Associate Professor in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for the eSocial Sciences, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Previously he held positions at Harvard University, University of Cambridge, Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies, and the Alan Turing Institute.

My research has both a social scientific and methodological orientation. For the social sciences, I research the effects of economic, political, and natural shocks on living standards and health, globally and locally. I implement and develop novel methodologies in machine learning and causal inference to analyze the causes and consequences of poverty and health. I have published in journals such as PNAS, Science Advances, World Development, International J of Epidemiology, American J of Epidemiology, and Ecological Economics, and in machine-learning conferences as Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). More information at www.adeldaoud.se.

I am leading The AI and Global Development Lab. The vision of the Lab is to “combine AI, earth observation, and social theory to analyze sustainable development globally and locally.” More information is provided at www.global-lab.ai )


Tags: Science, mentorship, leadership, coaching, academic growth, learning, entrepreneurship, business, startups.

00:00 - Introduction
00:57 - Finding headspace for entrepreneurship
03:24 - Any conflict of interests or goals?
05:38 - Maintaining control
12:15 - How to retain control without control?
13:35 - How to handle a no
14:35 - Going to zero to one
18:52 - Discovery of ideas and value
21:02 - The first move
23:39 - Ownership over patents
26:29 - How large is the hurdle to start?
27:05 - Which contributions get patented?
30:07 - You do not need a patent to start.
31:23 - Do not compete; differentiate.
33:03 - which ideas to pursue?
35:03 - What is the best timing?
45:59 - Capitalizing on poverty?
49:07 - The motivation is to solve real problems
50:14 - Founding the IQSS
53:20 - Ending advice.