That building a startup is actually quite hard — Jason says it's been a year and it's definitely harder than his research for his PhD. In a PhD he was minding his own research; for a company building full-stack robotics across hardware, software and AI, there are always many things moving at once, and shifting gears from an independent contributor to a leader is very hard.
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Asked for the most valuable lesson and what he wishes someone had told him earlier, Jason's answer is simply that "building a startup is actually quite hard." It's been a year, and it's definitely harder than when he did his research for his PhD — in his PhD he was "really just minding my own business, my own research, so there's not that much else to worry about." For a company like Dyna, they're trying to develop full-stack robotics, going from hardware to software to AI — everything — so there are always many things moving at the same time. He has to not only excel at what he already does, which is AI research, but also coordinate and collaborate with many different teams, prioritize the most important things in the company, and allocate resources accordingly. That's a big shifting of gears compared to just doing his research, and "shifting gears from an independent contributor to a leader is always very hard."