True, but there are gray areas in the middle ground: spend evenings and weekends on your research project, find part time employment that gives you a bit more spare time, do the research as a graduate student, live on the dole and eat noodles, ask family for support, take out a second mortgage on your house to pay the bills in the meantime, spend a year in Australia working as a bartender to save up enough money to cover a year of research, etc.
Of course none of these is ideal, and none is a permanent solution, but then, venture capitalists (let alone banks) usually won’t finance research—they’re looking for faster and surer payback, and even trying to do development as a startup is hard enough—so as a practical matter, most people with a research project they want to pursue end up having to try one or more of the gray area solutions at least for a while (unless you already have an established position in academia or a corporate think tank, and obtaining such a position is a hard and uncertain task with costs of its own).
So the truth is, unless you are particularly lucky, you’re going to be paying a substantial personal cost one way or another, which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but it does mean is this worth the cost even considering that I might fail? is a highly relevant question.
True, but there are gray areas in the middle ground: spend evenings and weekends on your research project, find part time employment that gives you a bit more spare time, do the research as a graduate student, live on the dole and eat noodles, ask family for support, take out a second mortgage on your house to pay the bills in the meantime, spend a year in Australia working as a bartender to save up enough money to cover a year of research, etc.
Of course none of these is ideal, and none is a permanent solution, but then, venture capitalists (let alone banks) usually won’t finance research—they’re looking for faster and surer payback, and even trying to do development as a startup is hard enough—so as a practical matter, most people with a research project they want to pursue end up having to try one or more of the gray area solutions at least for a while (unless you already have an established position in academia or a corporate think tank, and obtaining such a position is a hard and uncertain task with costs of its own).
So the truth is, unless you are particularly lucky, you’re going to be paying a substantial personal cost one way or another, which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but it does mean is this worth the cost even considering that I might fail? is a highly relevant question.