I m an engineering undergrad considering pursuing a PhD with the long-term goal of founding a hard-tech startup. I’m undecided about the specific area and only have a vague sense of what interests me -- industrial decarbonization, mining / mineral processing, and advanced materials are a few areas that currently seem exciting.However, I m unsure which type of PhD lab would provide better preparation: either a problem-first lab (e.g., like Yet-Ming Chiang at MIT) or a technology-first lab (e.g., your typical academic lab that focuses on novel science without a predetermined application, and where commercialization happens largely by chance — when a technology happens to have a valuable market application).I ve looked at advice online from successful hard-tech entrepreneurs, but the answers are conflicting. Some say to work backwards from a problem, but others argue that problem-first approaches often don t work since deep tech is inherently different: you often can t force a scientific breakthrough for a predetermined problem. Instead, they argue that most hard-tech companies are only founded because somebody made a scientific breakthrough and realized afterwards that there might be a commercial application. Indeed, the VC firm Pillar VC says that most deep-tech companies they know were technology-first. With that in mind, does anybody have any advice on which type of PhD lab to join?