Career Development Strategies E015 Natalia Bielczyk on Starting Your First Company as a PhD: Things That No One Will Tell You
Dr. Natalia Bielczyk is an entrepreneur, researcher, author, and philanthropist. She graduated from the College of Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Warsaw, Poland, with a triple MS title in Physics, Mathematics, and Psychology. Thereafter, she obtained a PhD in Computational Neuroscience at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In 2018, she launched a public foundation, Stichting Solaris Onderzoek en Ontwikkeling, aiming to help early career researchers find new careers in industry. She also owns Odyssey Careers, a company developing new tools and practices to help professionals in navigating on the job market, and in finding/creating their dream jobs. Even though she chose to work in the open market, she is still a researcher in her free time and has a strong belief in the compatibility of science and entrepreneurship.
In this special episode of the open Sunday webinar, Natalia talked about entrepreneurship for researchers. Is setting a company as a researcher hard? Under what circumstances should you consider registering a business? What are the traps you might potentially fall into? A startup or a sale proprietorship? How was the company created? What’s the vision, and the plans for developing the company further?