25 Apr 2011
MBAs and Entrepreneurship/Startups
My Social Media and Entrepreneurship class this semester has hosted a bunch of great speakers, and almost every week the topic of MBAs in the entrepreneurship world has come up. Some of our guests have MBAs (Chris Dixon, Fred Wilson), some don’t (Perry Chen, Scott Heiferman), but regardless, each time the issue comes up there’s I’ve observed a fair amount of tension. Maybe it’s because CBS is known as a finance-heavy school and the conversations would have been different at Stanford or Haas.
I think it boils down to misconceptions on both sides.
Which brings me to the below reblog from Whartonite Seeks Codemonkey, one of my favorite Tumblrs. What does it say about MBAs? That they (I guess I should say “we”) think they are hotshots with tons of good ideas and, when it comes to tech, they just need some programming peons to execute their grand visions.
Some of us probably are like that. In my experience, most are not.
On the entrepreneur/startup side, there seems to be a particularly New York bias against MBAs: a great encapsulation can be found in this Quora thread. The top ranked post in the thread is this comment:
Are you sure you want to break into the NYC startup scene?
If you really did, it seems you would have already moved to NY and gotten to work on it. You wouldn’t be considering delaying it by 2-3 years to go get more education.
Essentially: “Get some real experience. The opportunity cost (buzz word!) of school is too high.”
Chris Dixon admitted that he downplays the MBA he got from Harvard, but he and Fred Wilson (who went to Wharton) went on to discuss the value that an MBA can provide, when coupled with experience either at a startup or in a fast-growing (i.e. not mature) part of a tech company, like Amazon. That an MBA offers valuable skills is proven by Fred’s weekly “MBA Mondays” column on his blog, which covers basic finance, accounting and other topics taught in business school. (One could, of course, learn these skills without going to school, but I don’t want to dive into a pros/cons of an MBA here.)
Most interestingly, Chris discussed going into entrepreneurship and thinking of it like a career, taking place over the course of 30 years.
Above all, I think a lot of tension between MBAs and entrepreneurs stems from an age-old problem: they don’t always speak the same language. Example: one of my classmates likened the micro-donation principle behind Kickstarter to a securitized mortgage: contributions come from a wide range of people, so the funding for a Kickstarter project is, in a way, securitized (since numerous investors have pooled contributions to fund one entity). But Perry and Scott weren’t really sure what he was saying when he was talking about it in class.
Hopefully MBAs and entrepreneurs (not that they’re mutually exclusive: we have lots of examples in our class) will be able to close this gap as more MBAs join start-ups or found their own companies, and spend time in both worlds.
Please add your own perspective in the comments, if you’re so inclined.
Peanuts or Less. Srsly?
Could you possibly refer me to a programmer/application expert? I need a dedicated soul who would be willing to work for peanuts or less.
Thanks- ‘all about the sweat equity’
