news.ycombinator.com• Jul 2, 2026• 1 min read
Ask HN: Research vs. Founding a Tech Startup?Engineering + math graduate whose goal is to maximize impact. I am currently deciding between two career paths, but have been struggling a lot to determine which would be more impactful:1. Become a professor/researcher in robotics, working on mainstream technical problems such as zero-shot learning. (To be clear, I’m not primarily thinking about robotics safety or AI safety, but rather general robotics capabilities research.)2. Try to found “low-sophistication” hard-tech startups — i.e. products that are not extremely technically sophisticated and could easily be prototyped in a local makerspace, meaning any wannabe hard-tech founder could easily make it.Note: For personal and practical reasons, it is unlikely that I would found a highly sophisticated hard-tech company, i.e. one that requires advanced fabrication / other specialized technologies.TLDR: Has anyone here faced or thought seriously about a similar decision? If so, how did you decide where you had more counterfactual impact?