I'll save you the time of getting an MBA..
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this post is basically like one that's claiming "I'll save you the time of getting a driver's license" and simply telling you the local driving rules ... the LICENSE itself is what people need to get if they want to legally drive. an MBA is a 'license' to work in certain types of firms (probably those that HNers probably don't want to work at)
Is MBA important for a programmer to start a Tech Company?
the value of an MBA as a gateway to a Big Company job is not particularly helpful :)
Having an MBA has proven to be valuable for many people, and I have seen it open doors. As you point out, the school does matter, as companies typically target recruiting efforts to a few select schools, and getting in at these companies outside of the school recruiting channels is much more difficult. Whether an MBA is applicable to you depends on your goals. The goals of the YC community member are likely not aligned with what an MBA can offer.
In CS this could be having gained entry to MIT or having worked at Google. In these cases you have an institute that you respect saying "we've evaluated this person previously and they've met our high standards". So regardless of the fact that went to MIT or worked at Google, the very fact they got in conveys valuable information to the future employer.
I'm willing to bet that if you applied to hundred companies with two applications both otherwise identical but one having a MIT degree and one having a state college degree, the MIT degree application would get you far more interviews.
Also there's the fact that schools are different. There are plenty of college which are essentially "java schools" which have very minimal coverage of CS beyond programming, which is significantly different from what you'd get at somewhere like MIT. The same applies to MBA schools, but even more, there's no standardised curriculum and the quality of the teachers varies far more, you could be taught by the person who invented in industry the business practices he teaches, or alternatively by a teacher with no real interest in the subject and no industry experience.
There's a lot that can be learnt from books, but there's a huge amount of knowledge that can only be learnt from people with industry experience and that's a rare thing.
If you go to one of the top MBA programs then you'll meet some of the people that will be hired by other big corporations and you will be either competing against them or negotiating with them.
However, assuming you don't have (or can't show me that you have) the skill or experience I'm looking for yet (this applies to everyone who is just out of college, who didn't do significant work as an intern or significant project work, e.g. most recent grads.) I'll take a programmer from MIT over a programmer from woodland community college.
However, this is different from just getting your first job. Lots of people under perform. Sure, if I'm hiring sysadmins, I have a pretty good idea who's good and who's not. But if I'm hiring outside my area? I can't tell a good physicist from a bad one. hell, I can evaluate basic C proficiency, and I can search for kernel patches, but if I was hiring a kernel dev, while I could probably filter off the completely unqualified, I wouldn't know the really good from the mediocre. In those cases your school still counts, especially during the early parts of your career. (in the later parts of your career, the prestige of previous companies you have worked for takes some of that.)
Generally, hiring outside of your area is a bad idea and best avoided, but it happens. Some of that is necessary. I mean, I /need/ an accountant for all the same reasons why I'd be bad at evaluating an accountant.
Now, even then, school isn't the be-all and end-all... I chose my accountant because she ran a free question-and-answer blog[1], and seemed to know what she was talking about, and as far as I can tell, I chose well.
Still, I think that if you are going to school for the 'accreditation' value of a diploma, a diploma from a top tier school is worth rather a lot more than a diploma from a place I have not heard of.
Then, it's because business expertise and talent is hard to verify. Programming or engineering ability is easy to prove, even at entry level. You can't prove you can manage a large group until you're already in charge of a large group. This means a company is taking a big risk on hiring MBAs versus CS grads, and needs to look for some clear, objective signals before going ahead.
Finally, executives like hiring managers who went to the same school they did. I don't know exactly why this is the case -- reciprocity, maybe, or some notion of a shared vision of how to run a business.
On the other hand there was another group of 4 guys who all either dropped out of school or never went, and they are all some of the best devs I have ever worked with.
Finance, accounting, strategy, legal, HR, time management, sales, marketing, management...
The list is endless. I don't have an MBA. I have many friends who do and are spectacular entrepreneurs. I've acquired most of what they know over a decade of being an entrepreneur but another way to do it would have been to drop everything and dedicate 2 years to learning.
Here's an example of what you don't know because you don't have an MBA: Out of all of your sales prospects, the customers most likely to buy from you are those who just bought something from you.
Perhaps that comment on Reddit invalidates many viable businesses that could have sold an $100 loss leader to those prospects and then up-sold them on a $10,000 product a few months later.
Never underestimate how little you know.
The biggest question I'm struggling with these days is how to even drive users to your barebones landing page in the first place. For pay-to-use consumer apps or B2B apps, you can often seek out direct leads or use advertisments. For general consumer apps, it's much harder to generate a buzz. How do you even get started on driving traffic to something like that?
Once I come up with a compelling offer in the consumer space they'll jump all over it.
But seriously, an MBA is a little different from those couple paragraphs (though they do contain valuable advice). An MBA is often a way to get your foot in the door for Fortune 500 companies, or, in my case, as sweet way to get a cushy, low-involvement TA/GA/RA position while I work on my own startups and build a resume. That comment does not accomplish the same thing (clearly).
In my opinion, it is much like law school. You should have a pretty good idea of what you want to get out of it before you go, otherwise, when you finish you still won't know what you want to do with the degree.
If you want to jump from your current engineering job to a different field, getting an MBA can be a good transitioning point. If you want to go into quantitative finance, getting an MBA can also be very useful.
Just don't confuse getting and MBA with figuring out how to get your startup off the ground.
* I recently finished a "mini-MBA" at Kellogg. While I very much enjoyed the experience, and I do say that certain things we learned added some foundational theory to things such as pricing and strategy (ever wonder where tiered pricing comes from?), the experience has not given me some "magic key" to turning any idea into startup gold. Everyone here should already know that there is no silver bullet for that. If you don't know that, I don't think an MBA will help you.
I'd like to say that such things just get ignored, but it's hard not to get trolled.
Sometimes, simply throwing it out there for people to try, will raise interest. Many great company started with people inventing things they had no plan to sell.
The statement made in this post is naive at best. The strategy consisting of aiming at a potential customer, loading and shooting has created many monster failures too. Things are not that systematic.
It is obvious the writer does not know much about strategy courses delivered in MBA's...
Thank you!
I've heard LOIs discussed before, but primarily in the context of building & selling big-ticket systems. Do investors care at all about that kind of thing for smaller systems (say along the lines of GitHub/BaseCamp/Freckle/etc)?
figure out what your product is, then figure out who will buy it
Oh that's easy! Or perhaps an MBA teaches how to do that...?