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Comment by nuweborder | Hacker News Reader

You can be the greatest web programmer in the world, but if you cannot develop and articulate the ideas that are in your head, you have nothing. Thats what I learned among other things when getting my MBA. I learned how to think in the terms of taking a new idea from idea to reality, and making it a success.

I greatly appreciate the value that programmers bring. As it is, I cannot use my MBA to program my ideas into a working and successful web startup. I do not think that an MBA is absolutely necesssary. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and many other successful tech moguls have proven that. But, MBAs could can definately help in lowering the failure rates of startups by using their experience in finance, management and accounting. The best formula of all is to have both on hand. The MBA and the programmer. With the two, you cant go wrong.

Why do you think Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar hired Harvard MBA Meg Whitman as CEO?

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Why do you think Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar hired Harvard MBA Meg Whitman as CEO?

Yes but who would you rather be in that example?

Omidyar himself during the 2008 "Bubble" tv episode of "Download, The True Story of the Internet" on The Science Channel hosted by John Heilemann, stated that he hired Meg Whitman as CEO because he is not a business person and did not do any resarch to begin with, before he began writing the code to develop Ebay. He started with no business plan,and at first the site has very slim pickings of things to auction. In 1998 they hired Whitman because they he realized he need an "A List" business person on their team in order to define the company, direct it, and get it to be taken seriously. Whitman led Ebay to its IPO.

I am not a greedy person at all, and though I enjoy being a founder myself as I currently am one, I have both an MBA and am a founder. So I represent both sides and the best of both worlds. Whitman my not be the founder, but her efforts and that Harvard MBA has led her to the tune of of starting salary of $175k per year with an annual bonus of $100k. in 2008 this had grown a salary of $11 million per year,and today she still owns 3.9 million shares of Ebay stock. Not too shabby I'd say.

Meg Whitman's Ebay Employment Letter http://www.allbusiness.com/human-resources/workforce-managem...

Conversely, you can be great at developing and articulating the ideas in your head, but if you can't implement them well, someone else will.

I remember reading Robert Zubrin's thoughts on Mars expeditions. He argues that the ideal initial team to Mars would be four people: two engineers, two scientists. His rationale is that you need engineering and science, and that it's easier to crosstrain an engineer or scientist as a pilot and mission commander than it is to crosstrain a pilot to become an engineer or scientist.

Startups are a lot like going to Mars: to do one well, you need people who know how to do the real work, since you have limited cabin space. You can call Mission Control to do a lot of stuff, but the most important work requires the people there in the capsule with you. From that perspective, you can cross-train a programmer to do business easier than you can cross-train a pure business person to do programming.

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