Making the Shift from Research to Revenue: Skills that Physicists Need to be Successful in Business

Physicists bring with them many useful skills for starting businesses: the ability to develop innovative ideas, a comfort with technology and mathematics, and the grit required to solve hard problems. However there are key skills that physicists often lack: sales, marketing, accounting, law, and interpersonal skills key to business. Luckily these skills are learnable. In my talk I will discuss my long path to learning them when I left physics to start Octopart and how this process can be accelerated for physicists starting businesses today.