The head of staff of his department brought him onto a Zoom call, screen-shared the Lumiere website with his face and bio, and asked "Stephen, is this you?" The department then gave him an ultimatum: "you can either do your PhD or you can run your company but you can't do both."
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Stephen describes it as a setup. The head of staff asked for a Zoom call; there was one other person in the room; then she started screen-sharing the Lumiere website with his face and the profile reading "hi I'm Stephen Turban I'm a PhD student at HBS." She said, "Stephen, is this you?" The department's verdict — which Stephen calls reasonable, given that they give you a stipend — was do the PhD or run the company, not both. At the time he felt bummed, but he calls it "an amazing forcing function." He realized he just loved doing the startup thing, told himself "I'll just pause the PhD and I can always go back," and went all in.