The Accidental Entrepreneur

Like many other scientists and engineers who have ended up founding companies, I didn't leave Caltech as an entrepreneur. I had no training in business; after my sophomore year of college I didn't take any courses outside of chemistry, math, and physics. My career as an entrepreneur happened quite by accident. And it ran counter to early predictions. When I was graduating from Cal tech with my PhD in chemistry in 1954, I interviewed for jobs with several companies, one of which was Dow Chemical. Dow was interested in setting up a research laboratory in California, and they thought I might be someone they could send to headquarters in Midland, Michigan, to train to come back here in some kind of managerial role. So they sent me to a psychologist to see how this would fit. The psychologist said I was OK technically but I'd never manage anything. Dow did end up offering me a job in Midland, but the transfer back to California was no longer a part of it. I didn't go to Midland after all, but went instead to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which has roughly the same relationship to Johns Hopkins that JPL has to Caltech, and where I could continue to do basic research in areas related to what I had done before. But I found myself calculating the cost per word in the articles we published and wondering if the taxpayers were really getting their money's worth at $S per word. Just as I was starting to worry about the taxpayers, the group I was working in was, for various reasons, breaking apart. So I decided to look for something that had a bit more of a practical bent, and at the same time see There is such a thing as a natural-born entrepreneur. . But the accidental entrepreneur like me has to fall into the opportunity or be pushed into it.