Vlad Tenev studied pure math at Stanford and explains why the field offers limited jobs without coding skills, forcing many toward grueling PhD programs with few slots and tenure that might come in your 30s or 40s. He sees entrepreneurship and math as kindred: both require tolerating short-term pain to build something that lasts.
Chapters
I think that math and physics is a very great example of playing the long game. Why do people get into it? You make very little money and let's say you graduate and I experienced this. I graduated Stanford with a math major in pure math. I wasn't very employable at the time because everyone wanted to know, do you code? And as, as a math major you do a little bit of coding, but I'm not a computer science major. Right. So then obviously the path is math grad school where a lot of the top programs just don't have high budgets. You have, I think Harvard has like room for eight math PhD students every year, for example. And it just gets more and more selective and selective and the stakes, you know, and the competition gets harder and harder the more you ascend and then maybe eventually you get tenured when you're in your 30s or 40s and the payoff is creating something that sort of adds to the body of work, of society, to the general sort of like body of knowledge. And maybe if you're lucky enough, they teach it in schools and people will learn your theories and your work. So it's very much a long game. And I think that type of long term thinking of just doing the right thing and tolerating some short term pain and struggle and being misunderstood, that's probably the most salient lesson from math because there's people that studied computer science and hum bio and they would go off to med school and others would go and get a job at Google when I was there. And, and that's sort of very, very direct, but I think Baiju and I both were not interested in that and we just really wanted to prioritize doing something that made an impact on society and it took a different form. But both math and entrepreneurship kind of have that as its kernel.
