Are all the entrepreneurs you've talked with the kind of people who made something like Wufoo or HARO? Because if you were trying to do a rollup or start a wireless company then I think having an MBA would make a pretty big difference.
There are plenty of folks out there who benefit from the business training and fundamentals an MBA curriculum provides. Obviously there are just as many people who don't need MBAs, or who succeeded without the degree. That's cool. Different strokes for different folks. Let's stop thinking in such Manichean terms about the degree.
That is why the "mindless bashing" is so important. It is a defence mechanism. It is vitally important that we remember from our past mistakes and codifying that knowledge into stereotypes is a great way of making sure that knowledge sticks around an is remembered.
Besides, I don't think many MBAs are losing sleep over a few techies on HN thinking that they're full of shit.
When presented with the numerous and obvious counter-examples to "MBA's are full of shit", they clam up and resort to "yeah, but they're assholes, immoral, and basically stole their way to the top".
If you can't code, you're not smart. And if you're not smart, how are you more successful than me? (Success is derived from smarts, right? Dammit, I'm SMART.) Therefore you must be a cheating douche bag. And man, there are a lot of you cheating douche bags.
No, the problem is not the MBA. It is the refusal of some to accept a broader world view in which different people can do great things despite vastly varying approaches and skills.
I really don't agree. I have/had nothing against business people (they always threw way better parties in college after all ;).
Similarly, MBAs are great at running businesses. The trouble arises when we do what we did in the 90s and let them drive the businesses, make the businesses, that sort of thing.
The issue can be summed up I think as MBAs squeezing out high status technologists (http://www.codebelay.com/blog/2011/08/14/low-status-and-high...). When that happens, the 90s happen. To fight this perceived threat, we have negative stereotypes that keep people on their toes. They are essentially antibody memes.
Incorrect. An MBA is only proven to be great at one thing. Getting a Masters in Business degree.
Totally fair, but then, I chose the descriptor "mindless" for a good reason. I used it to distinguish a certain type (a subset, if you will) of bashing, i.e., the senseless kind. Not all bashing is senseless, but a lot of it is.
There is certainly justified bashing, of the "Some schmucky MBA I've never met just emailed me and asked me to code his Facebook-meets-Amazon-meets-Holodeck project for $1000" variety. That kind of bashing makes sense.
But the carpet-bashing of all MBAs, or of the MBA-qua-MBA, has perhaps grown a little stale.
(Did I really just use the phrase "carpet-bashing"?)
How would an MBA make a pretty big difference for a wireless company?
So they don't look at whether I have a sound business but whether I have an MBA when they are in their 60s and 70s???
Care to give some examples?
Are you really arguing what I think you are arguing?
That doesn't make any sense at all. For something completely unproven, corporate finance doesn't even come into picture. I don't know how your wireless example relate to this, since wireless isn't completely unproven - more like "it works and we have a lot of base to build onto.
Let's say we are talking about self-driving cars, as an example of something completely unproven which is well served by millions of dollars. Corporate finance and strategy aren't going to drive that car for sure.
The MBA is one indication that a person is responsible handling* vast sums of money. Having some actual experience handling vast sums of money is even better. Without that experience though, the MBA is the next best thing.
* By responsible handling of money, I mean things like having made concious decisions about the debt structure of the business, hedging risks (eg. use of forward contracts to hedge currency risks), care between capital and revenue expenditure for tax purposes. To say nothing of the other areas of the MBA to understand how the different functions of the business work together. And if you're building a large business you're going to have different functions of the business so folks feel more comfortable knowing that the guy in charge knows about these different functions and how they operate.
The doors that open up are numerous - like being able to credibly get in front of the right private equity firm interested in doing a wireless roll-up.
There's no magic here. It's just work and education.
It speaks nothing of whether one become better at doing business what so ever.
I have worked with my share of MBAs they are as diverse as any other group but none of them owe it to their MBA.
Your engineering degree help you become better at engineering because you can more or less predict the outcome of how things behave. The theories are seldomly proven wrong.
If the matter you control in engineering were made of "business matter" life would be much more dangerous than it already is. Humans don't follow the laws of physics the same way.
You seem to be confusing doing good inside larger organizations with being good at business. There is little to no correlation.
Being good at business is more like being good at music. Education is no guarantee for success. Feel free to prove me wrong.
There is real, honest value in bringing a bunch of smart people from a wide range of backgrounds together for two years to study the way people behave while engaging in commerce. That the nature of business is poorly described by physical laws makes it no less worthy of study. There are good and bad ways to do accounting, finance, operations - even marketing. Why not learn about it? And if you do learn about it, how can that be a bad thing?
Education is about learning how to think. My engineering profs and peers taught me a lot about one way to approach problems. My business school professors and peers taught me an equally useful, and almost completely orthogonal outlook on life.
They are necessary yes, so is cleaning, your systemadministration etc.
You are not learning how to run a business successfully by learning that.
But the big difference is that to be good at business you have to do business. You can't look it up in a book. With engineering your more or less can.
So unless you are a hired gun working inside a proven industry for a company the MBA is pretty much worthless. The engineer on the other hand seldom is.
When you deal with business you deal with humans not immaterial matter.
That's thee difference here. And for that no amount of education is going to make you more successful. Again feel free to prove me wrong.
Probably more so than the cleaning of the office (which is handled by the building).
Maybe we are an outlier though.
I meet and advise many entrepreneurs and most of the time they fall into common traps stemming from lack of understanding of market dynamics, how companies make decisions, what companies worry about, what matters, etc. A common example: thinking about cost and not value when it comes to selling a(n enterprise) product. Or forgetting about risk management for their new cloud-based solution.
For tech startups, there is no question that everyone on the early team needs to understand, live, and breathe technology. A lot of folks are attracted to the Facebook-size wealth generation (including MBAs) and end up destroying value because they don't understand technology.
Full disclosure: I have an MBA. I also have been programming since I was 9 and have built and sold two companies. I fully believe that a lot of MBAs don't add value when it comes to startups in particular (see Steve Blank's recent posts explaining why) and many times in mature companies as well. Of course, that is true for people in general - i.e. there are many engineers, designers, marketing folks, etc. who are just not very good at their jobs. It all comes down to looking for the exceptional gems!
Most people with MBA aren't like you and thus won't reap the benefits of perspective.
Do people actually come straight out of an MBA program and start a company that requires hundreds of millions of dollars in funding?
I feel I would be skeptical of anyone who wasn't already sitting around a kitchen table with hackers at some point in their life and, more importantly, have shown they have some ability to run a successful business that didn't require the massive funding.