There are many ways of looking at this, most disturbing. I imagine that my own experience working to support PhD candidates and post-docs a decade ago is instructive. The TL-DR: failed start-up.
I went back to school during the post-2001 recession and found myself with a job writing signal processing software to make sense of the data coming off an experimental mass spectrometer. I was offered a job by our lead researcher (a post-doc) upon graduation who saw an opportunity to turn a grant into a private lab. There were some political and University-inspired patent spin-off aspects, too.
The lab was built to create a product that used, but had little to do with, his research. I got a rag mag and a poster session publication credit from the early company efforts to build an in-house mass spectrometry device before he left and returned to being a post-doc (he is now a tenured professor). The people left steering the company ballooned the corporate efforts using off-the-shelf tech to rush a product to market just as the 2008 crash impacted and the targeted customer base (people wanting spa-like boutique medical tests to determine which vitamins they should take) evaporated. I was dismissed in the first wave of the toilet spiral and the company ceased to exist 18 months later.
The point behind my story is that as the pool of post-docs increases, we are more likely to see more adventures like the one I went through. Some of these start-ups will succeed, leading to a survivor-bias feedback loop at the policy level that we need even more STEM students to feed the start-up machine, leading to growth.
I have no doubt that this will, in fact, work as a growth engine. My question is whether this can be made more efficient by providing a few more prestigious fellowships and other funding to keep the most brilliant in the game before they kick off into business.
This is exactly why I started my startup nonprofit (details in info). Not too many of my peers are equally as crazy as I am though... I quit my postdoc and started driving for Lyft to make bills while waiting for 501(c)(3) status - it resulted in a net 20% pay increase, although since prices have gone down it's not nearly as good.
Your story is similar to mine. I am a current PhD student (finishing this semester) and founder of a new startup, The Winnower (thewinnower.com), that aims to centralize academic blogs and make scientific publishing more transparent.
I went back to school during the post-2001 recession and found myself with a job writing signal processing software to make sense of the data coming off an experimental mass spectrometer. I was offered a job by our lead researcher (a post-doc) upon graduation who saw an opportunity to turn a grant into a private lab. There were some political and University-inspired patent spin-off aspects, too.
The lab was built to create a product that used, but had little to do with, his research. I got a rag mag and a poster session publication credit from the early company efforts to build an in-house mass spectrometry device before he left and returned to being a post-doc (he is now a tenured professor). The people left steering the company ballooned the corporate efforts using off-the-shelf tech to rush a product to market just as the 2008 crash impacted and the targeted customer base (people wanting spa-like boutique medical tests to determine which vitamins they should take) evaporated. I was dismissed in the first wave of the toilet spiral and the company ceased to exist 18 months later.
The point behind my story is that as the pool of post-docs increases, we are more likely to see more adventures like the one I went through. Some of these start-ups will succeed, leading to a survivor-bias feedback loop at the policy level that we need even more STEM students to feed the start-up machine, leading to growth.
I have no doubt that this will, in fact, work as a growth engine. My question is whether this can be made more efficient by providing a few more prestigious fellowships and other funding to keep the most brilliant in the game before they kick off into business.