Breaking Free from the Lab: Ditching the Academic Mindset for Startup Success

I organized a workshop last week for about twenty super smart academics from 3 Top-Tier universities. The room was full of scientists, PhD’s, graduate students, researchers, professors and post-doc’s. I heard big and small ideas from their lab using words I did not know nor even knew how to spell to look up. These potential entrepreneurs are intellectual mavens that have mastered the academic mindset. Yes, that is a game too.

If you’ve spent years mastering what Seth Godin calls the industrial education model, you’re in for a rude awakening when you step into entrepreneurship. The rules you’ve lived by—memorize, execute, and get graded—simply don’t apply here. In fact, they almost certainly will fail you on this new journey.

The industrial education mindset teaches you to wait for instructions, follow the rules, and earn approval from authority figures. It rewards predictability and punishes failure. You’re told what’s on the test, you prepare, and your performance is evaluated against a known standard. In the lab, your work is hopefully published, reviewed by peers, and then the university grades you in that endeavor in order to set your promotion opportunities.?

Entrepreneurship, on the other hand, operates in an entirely different universe. There is no syllabus, no professor, no known and predictable rubric for success. Being the smartest means almost nothing. No one gives you permission to act, and there’s no one standing by to grade your efforts. The only measure that matters? What the market tells you. Finding that market with your product or service before you run out of time or money is the challenge.

This shift is jarring. Many first-time, academically-oriented founders feel paralyzed because they’re waiting for someone to validate their work, to tell them they’re good enough to keep going. But in entrepreneurship, no one does that in that way. In fact, most peers assume you will fail. You have to take initiative, trust your instincts, and learn from the feedback the market provides. It’s messy, ambiguous, and yes, often really uncomfortable.

The key difference between these two mindsets is how they treat failure. In the industrial education model, failure is something to avoid at all costs—it’s a mark against you. But in entrepreneurship, failure is baked into the process. Every misstep is a lesson, every pivot is progress. The market doesn’t care about your GPA or how polished your pitch deck is; it cares about whether your product solves a real problem.

To succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to unlearn the need for external validation and adopt a mindset of curiosity and experimentation. Instead of asking, “Am I doing this right?” you need to ask, “What can I learn from this?” You’ll need to embrace ambiguity, take risks, and redefine success as making meaningful progress—not achieving graded perfection.

Breaking free from the industrial education mindset isn’t easy, but it’s essential. True entrepreneurship begins when you stop waiting for permission and start building, iterating, and learning.?