Creating a career to create careers

As an astronomy graduate student in Copenhagen, Kim Nilsson arranged to install an instrument on a user telescope. As a postdoc in Heidelberg, Germany, she organized a conference. Along the way, she began to think that her skills might prove useful outside of an academic career. But what new work could she turn to?

Kim Nilsson
Credit: Pivigo Ltd

After some twists and turns, she and Jason Muller, whom she met in business school, founded Pivigo as a recruitment company for PhDs in science, technology, engineering, and math fields. “We started our business because we are passionate about helping PhDs getting jobs,” says Nilsson. They soon retooled the business to focus mainly on preparing people to transition into data science (see Physics Today, August 2016, page 20).

Nilsson told Physics Today‘s Toni Feder about her trajectory in astrophysics and shared how she became an entrepreneur.

PT: Why did you go into astrophysics?

NILSSON: I remember when I was about 13 years old, I couldn’t sleep one night. I was looking at the stars, and I wondered to myself, “Why are they twinkling?” I went to the library and borrowed a book on astronomy. I read it from cover to cover and that’s what hooked me.

After high school I went to Lund University [in Sweden], where I specialized in astronomy. That was the start of my career. I did my master’s in Sweden, went to Copenhagen for my PhD, and later went to Germany for a postdoc.

PT: What was your research area, and how did you happen to arrange an instrument for the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) in Chile?

NILSSON: I was studying high-redshift galaxies, specifically using a technique called narrow-band filter observations. In my first year of the PhD, I had this idea while listening to a talk by the telescope’s chief scientist at a conference. My idea was that we could buy a narrow-band filter, letting light through at a specific wavelength, for the VISTA telescope. It would allow us to detect galaxies at a redshift of 7.7 [when the universe was about 700 million years old], which at the time was unprecedented. This was in early 2005.

The next day, I plodded up to the chief scientist and told him about my idea. He said they had themselves considered equipping the telescope with those types of filters, but they didn’t have the budget or the science rationale for it. But it was something he was open to.

I managed to persuade my supervisor that it was a great idea, and together we managed to get funding—about €40 000 [$53 000]—from the University of Copenhagen to buy this hardware.

About a third of my PhD [went to] managing the purchase of this hardware. Reflecting back on those three years, I realized it was the part of the PhD I had enjoyed most. So that may have been my first inkling that I would not stay in science for long.

PT: How did you transition out of research?

NILSSON: I didn’t know how to translate my skills. I didn’t know how to convince companies to be interested in my skills. I had had the dream to become an astronomer for 12 years, so I was not about to let go of that dream straight away. I did a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. Then I got an offer to go to Munich as the Hubble astronomer at the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility. It was a two-year contract. After about a year, I was determined it was going to be my last science job.

Still, I knew nothing about what options were available. The only resources were other astronomers that I knew who had already left science. Most of them had gone into software development, which I was not interested in. Some had gone into finance, but I was not so keen on that either.

Then someone suggested that I look into management consulting. I had no idea what that was. I went home and Googled McKinsey, and I thought, “Yes, that sounds really cool, I’d love to do that.” I applied to all of the main consultancies. I interviewed with most of them, but I didn’t end up with a single offer. This was in 2010.

I was absolutely devastated. But by that time I had gotten extremely excited about business and what one could do in management roles. So I thought, “OK, I have to leave academia the only way I know how—which is academia.” I decided to get an MBA.

PT: Where did you do the MBA? And how was it?

NILSSON: I went to Cranfield University, about an hour and a half from London. It was a one-year full-time program.

When I got to the MBA program, I was very nervous about it. I felt that I knew nothing about business, and I was the only scientist there. But after a couple of weeks, I realized I could do just as well as the others. And actually, about 85% is about intuition and logic and common sense and working with people. I really had an epiphany when I realized that it’s not something you learn in a textbook or a lecture; it’s just something you have.

PT: How did you start your own business after the MBA?

NILSSON: If you’d asked me in the first few months if I was going to start my own business, I would have said you were absolutely insane. That’s way too risky for me. I want a job. But I had a bit of a transition that year. As my confidence grew, I learned that risk is not always bad. And Cranfield has a very strong emphasis on personal development and understanding your strengths and weaknesses. I think I just got to know myself better.

I started to realize that autonomy and being able to drive projects forward—patterns from my past, the VISTA instrument and the astronomy conference—were sort of entrepreneurial. I also realized that I would struggle in a corporate environment with a strict hierarchy.

In the second half of the year, we had to do an entrepreneurship elective. For that, we had to write a business plan. I came up with the idea for a recruitment business, because it happened to be a problem that I had faced myself. Then I remembered that at some sort of workshop I had talked to Jason and he had told me about his recruitment background.

We ended up working on my idea as a purely theoretical exercise for the MBA. At the end of the year we looked at each other and said we should give this a go. That’s how Pivigo was born.

PT: It seems like many boot camps started sprouting up around the same time. Did you know about others?

NILSSON: In the first year, we were really focusing on getting PhDs recruited, trying to help them find jobs in analytical industries. But we felt there was a bit of a structural problem in that: We had all of these super PhDs as candidates, but they didn’t know how to present themselves, and they didn’t have commercial experience. At the same time, we had companies screaming out for data scientists, but they looked at our PhDs and said, “They haven’t done this before. I don’t trust that they can do it.”

I saw Insight Data Science [a program in Palo Alto, California, that prepares scientists to move into data science] on the web, and I thought it sounded exactly like what we needed here in the UK to bridge the gap. I emailed them to see if they wanted help setting up their program here. When I didn’t hear back, we decided to do it ourselves. That was in 2013. We ran our first Science to Data Science [S2DS] program in August 2014.

Now we run three programs a year. The largest is in London, which we run just once a year. And we also have a virtual program that we run twice a year. It’s the same concept.

PT: Who participates in S2DS?

NILSSON: It’s been changing over the three years we have run it. At first, the majority were astrophysicists because of my network, and I was flooding everyone I knew. Now physics is number one, and life science is number two—we have a lot from computational biology. We also have people from computer science, math, engineering, economics, and even participants from the social sciences.

PT: Where do you see things going in the future?

NILSSON: We are continuing to improve on the S2DS program. There is such a large need for it, on both sides of the equation, so we are trying to make it bigger and better.

As a company, we have raised money to build a data science marketplace. The idea is an internet platform, where on the one hand PhDs, graduates, freelancers, and anyone else can sign up and create a profile. And on the other hand, companies can come and post projects, things they want done with their data, or questions they want answered about their data. We will connect the companies with people from the community who could work on the projects. My vision is to make this an option for freelancers to do full-time work—just take project after project and make a living from it.

And in the longer term, we have an exit plan. I am an inherently impatient person, and I will want to move on and try something else at some point.

PT: Does your astronomy/astrophysics background help you in your current work?

NILSSON: Absolutely, in many ways. The fact that I have lived and breathed science for so many years helps me connect with the people who go through our program. That’s on the soft side. On the technical side, I know all the data science techniques. That helps me enormously when talking to clients.

PT: The UK voted in June to leave the European Union. How does Brexit affect you as a Swede in London?

NILSSON: It was quite shocking. I don’t think anyone expected that result. In the tech world in London absolutely no one wanted this result. Everyone was horrified. We all feel that the society is moving in a direction that is more nationalistic, more narrow-minded, more afraid of the unknown. It’s not nice.

For my business, there will be effects. It’s hard to tell what they will be. It’s pretty clear there will be a recession, and data science is one of the areas where companies may pull in some of their investments, because they tend to pull back on anything new and focus on business as usual. So our market may shrink, at least temporarily. But we feel we have time to react to the situation and adapt to it.

For me personally, I can’t imagine that I am going to be kicked out of the country anytime soon. But you woke up that Friday morning, and suddenly you knew that half the people don’t want you in the country. It was a shocking revelation. And it’s very, very sad.

I pay taxes, and I pay corporate taxes. And the business I built is employing British people. But we get over the shock, and we put our heads down and get on with things. We are extremely determined to show at S2DS this August just how positive diversity can be. We have 92 people registered from over 30 nations. We are extremely proud of that, and we want to show how innovative and exciting it can be to have all these people together.