An MBA will:
...introduce you to many, many smart, helpful, agressive, motivated people. Hundreds of them. And you will have two years to go drinking with them, travel the world with them, and get to know them. That alone is extremely valuable. There is a bond of shared experience that is unobtainable by "reading books".
...make you smarter about the worlds of big business and finance. This classroom stuff is mostly available in books. Mostly. But are you really going to read them? Finance is not the hardest thing I've ever learned, but having a few classmates and professors who had been investment bankers and money managers is a good thing.
...be really, really fun and educational, just not in the way you're thinking.
An MBA will not:
...prepare you for a startup. The tech business has a lot to it that just isn't taught in B-School. You'll have to learn that on your own like everyone else.
...prepare your for a career in big business. EVERY business has a lot to it that just isn't taught in B-School. You'll have to learn that on your own like everyone else.
...fast track you to wealth. Business school is expensive these days. You'll be broke for a while as you recover unless you're really, really lucky.
...turn you into an asshole. Assholedom takes root at a much younger age.
Is it worth it? For me, it's an unambiguous "HELL YES".
In perhaps the funnest two years of my life I managed to:
travel to 7 countries
play rugby with schools from around the world
learn more than I ever imagined about finance.
learn less than I would have thought about marketing.
meet many of my best friends, including several startup CEOs.
meet my wife.
watch my school win a national championship in football.
drink more than is healthy.
see some really smart people do some amazingly dumb and wonderful things, sometimes simultaneously.
and that's just the stuff that comes to mind now. A fantastic experience overall.
In many ways this is similar to incubator programs for these companies, lots of these companies were going to succeed or fail whether or not they went through these programs, others were probably on the cusp without it and with it they will flourish because of the impact of being around bright people with good ideas and lots of feedback.
Business school helps lots of people. But it is not for everyone. Some will benefit more than others because they need structure. Those types of people likely will not be the ones running a company some day. If you need structure being an entrepreneur simply put, probably is not for you. It's a scary ride full of ups and downs, twists and turns and lots of bumps along the way, but it can be one of the most rewarding things you'll ever do if you stick with it.
There is a lot to be said for those people who go through business school then go on to become great business people and entrepreneurs ... first of all they have patience and vision. They are usually working toward a goal and they have carefully planned out how to reach it. Sometimes those plans work and other times they do not, but either way in most of those cases those were the people who were already destined to become great.
To be an entrepreneur is in your blood ... for the people who have started a company and one day said to themselves "Why would I ever work for anyone other than myself" they know exactly what I am talking about. You have to be able to be stubborn enough to know when to not give up but realistic enough to know when to cut your losses and move another direction.
The only difference between a successful business man and a failing one is time ... the more time you put into something the more likely you are to succeed. Being wise helps, being conservative with spending is even better, but being willing to go without is what truly makes good business people great, while they do not teach that in business school if you read about the great entrepreneurs of all time that is one thing they almost all have in common, and that, is one thing that can never be either learned nor taught.
Some ways in which the MBA/Management Consulting mentality has really helped the company:
-Extreme customer focus. HN talks a lot about knowing your customer, but the management here takes it to a much higher level. The exacting level of detail of how well they understand users, as well as the amount of time/money they're willing to invest in training their employees to understand their customers is astounding, and pays in spades.
-Really good Sales/Marketing
-Since we started out with consulting, the company has always been profitable, and always had a very clear line of sight as to what brings in the money
-Very well thought out, long term strategy. The company has the next several years planned out, yet the strategy is flexible enough to take into account new technological innovations, data from customer responses, and even new exceptional employees
-Very well done hiring. I haven't met anyone at the company I would consider stupid-in fact, I haven't met anyone I wouldn't consider smart
-Excellent resource management...even as the company has grown money and people are assigned to the projects that consistently provide the most leverage, rather than being tacked onto the emergency of the day
Now the MBA/Management Consulting strength is not the only thing that has allowed the company to succeed-we are roughly 60% hackers and our CTO is absolutely phenomenal. But having management with such strong business skills is a MASSIVE force multiplier.
Probably HN unrelated but: I would love to hear more about that and how this is actually turning out. From my perspective the whole Strategic Planning thing has come under severe attack at least since Mintzberg's Rise & Fall of Strategic Planning. And if I remember correctly from reading the Lords of Strategy even Porter has grown more skeptical on Strategic planning in the long term. Would love to see how this is turning out in practice/is implemented/realized at your company.
I think an MBA still provides value for those looking to take established startups and turn them into viable, Fortune 500 businesses. These are the folks that become the "adult supervision" during the later stages of a company as it approaches that mid-market sweet spot and starts trying to become a large cap public company. There are areas around finance, operations, and strategy where the MBA still provides a lot of value.
You can certainly learn those things on the job if you decide to stay at a startup beyond the early stages. But it carries a bit more risk and mistakes can be a lot more costly.
I don't think most of the crowd here is all that interested in working at companies during these later stages, hence the strong anti-MBA sentiment you see in a lot of HN posts.
The biggest problem, I think, is that there are now too many folks with MBAs that are skilled only for the later stages of the company. These folks often lack the raw talent needed to succeed in the early stages and get a company off the ground.
I have multiple startups with varying levels of success since I was 16, and its extremely evident to me thats its not just what you know, but who you know as well. I think an mba from a top-tier university will help me open some of the doors I want to open in my career.
Most of the successful MBAers I have met are actually engineers who have had a company pay for them to get their MBA to 'traditionally promote' them to a higher position in said company.
In my opinion MBAs are like glue that hold a company together, the glue is absolutely critical for the company but you also don't require an army of it.