What's wrong with that? IMO wanting to be an entrepreneur is one of the best reasons to start a company :)
Best email I got from a start-up that wanted to hire me went something like this: "We are a team of 5 MBAs with an idea and need you to be our employee #1 to build it!"
I mean 5 founders seems rather excessive to me but all of them MBAs and the only technical person will be an employee and not a co founder.
Others, usually also dubbed "tech startups" due to their Silicon Valley location, use generic pieces of technology to achieve their purpose. There are entire sectors (ad tech, Uber for X), where basic building blocks have been built and now it's sell, sell, sell.
One of the people not mentioned on the list is founder of Warby Parker - surely he contributed to the bubble by building the 2nd most profitable retail stores and one of the few startups that are actually profitable.
So what I didn't even graduate college? I'm proud to have built a company whose employees are happy and treated with dignity. Diligence, respect and passion drove people like me to success, not a HBS MBA.
From experience, that's not what usually happens with MBAs. Because of an 'alumni list' or a privileged network, many feel entitled to success and will do anything to reach their goals(often unethically).
Hence, they are not actual engineers actively building a product.
Please do build a company, but not a money-making scheme treating developers like dispensable tools.
One would think we'd come up with better ways by now to lessen the allocation of resources for things in the present that are of marginal utility for most people, but somehow, humans have a knack of creating/engaging red queens races relative to other things that are theoretically possible and feasible.
"I want to be an executive" is a pretty fucking lame vision, as it were. I'd rather be around people who have concrete ideas of what they want to build, and who'll lead when appropriate and follow when appropriate. People who say, "I'm a leader" but don't have a good sense of where they want to lead, are annoying. What they're really saying is, "I think that, based on some linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image, I have the right to a job where I tell other people what to do."
I don't think that all MBAs are douchebags. I know plenty whom I like a lot. Unfortunately, the culture of business school and especially the elite business schools is one of entitlement and position-seeking. When that type of person founds a startup, you get a lot of the same toxic big-company behaviors and formalities and political structures, but in a small company that can't afford the inefficiencies. Now you have the worst of both worlds between small companies and big ones, and a high likelihood of failure or, if the connections are there, Knewton-esque mediocrity.
Oddly enough, if I had a child I'd recommend that he go to the highest-ranking business school out there. Harvard is going to open doors that are just ridiculous, whereas the #20 school is probably educationally equivalent, but isn't going to make you a CEO at 30. On the other hand, if I were hiring, I'd be extremely skeptical of the Harvard MBA and less skeptical of the Booth MBA and even less skeptical of the UWash MBA. In most educational divisions, the correlation between prestige and douchebaggery is nonexistent, i.e. Yale law students aren't noticeably douchier, or less douchey, than students at middling schools; in MBA school, it's clearly a positive correlation (although Stanford is probably worse than Harvard, though less prestigious, for obvious reasons).
What do you mean here by linear combination? If you wrote the same thing and said nonlinear combination would we have come away with a different interpretation? Is this just injecting random math terms to raise the status and credibility of the speaker?
It's a problem I see in a certain non-MBA culture (and am guilty of myself all the time too).
Or maybe I'm just missing something about what you meant.
> What do you mean here by linear combination?
I suspect that Michael means that the people who claim on leadership position without having proved themselves will justify their self entitlement x % by their pre-existing social resources and (1-x) % by what they think of themselves.
Yes, you don't have to hold an MBA to think like that, but a diploma from a prestigious institution sure helps boost your ego, and being born from wealthy parents helps as well.
A linear model is the simplest model, which is sometimes an asset (in some cases, linear regression is the best statistical model for its simplicity) and sometimes makes it crude and underfit to the problem. I was focusing on the latter.
That seems like a very mean way to say they don't want to be a cog in a machine.
> "I want to be an executive" is a pretty fucking lame vision, as it were.
By "I want to be an executive" do you mean "I'd rather not work for a boss"? Is there a difference in those two desires? How is that fucking [sic] lame?
> What they're really saying is, "I think that, based on some linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image, I have the right to a job where I tell other people what to do."
Actually, "I have the right" is your words, not theirs.
> I don't think that all MBAs are douchebags.
Whoa, whoa. Nobody said they were douchebags.
> I know plenty whom I like a lot.
And I have a lot of gay friends (but I wouldn't say I like them "a lot").
> Unfortunately, the culture of business school and especially the elite business schools is one of entitlement and position-seeking.
What is a culture of entitlement? People just go to business school and... sit there and be entitled? What is a culture of position-seeking? Do they seek positions in companies? Does engineering school also have a culture of position-seeking, or is that different somehow?
> When that type of person founds a startup, you get a lot of the same toxic big-company behaviors and formalities and political structures, but in a small company that can't afford the inefficiencies.
So some MBA's aren't that good. I think we all already know that some startup founders suck. But others must be good, or turn out to run successful companies, or investors would just unilaterally cease funding any MBA's. The phenomenom of bad founders is not limited in any special way to people that got MBA's, either. So in what way is the problem with business schools, or the people that go to them? (Aside from the usual complaint you hear from a lot of people, that you're repeating, about MBA's that don't really know what they're doing because they don't have experience, which we get when people make stereotypical complaints about management consultants too.)
> In most educational divisions, the correlation between prestige and douchebaggery is nonexistent, i.e. Yale law students aren't noticeably douchier, or less douchey, than students at middling schools; in MBA school, it's clearly a positive correlation (although Stanford is probably worse than Harvard, though less prestigious, for obvious reasons).
It would be helpful if you could point us to an academic study that makes these measurements of douchiness. I don't hang out with enough law school graduates and business school graduates from these respective schools to be able to tell if what you are saying is true, but I guess you hang out with enough of them from each major business school and law school to have figured this all out.
I don't have any problem with club presidents in general. I do have a problem with some of the ideas U.S. culture (or at least middle class upward-aspiring culture) has about leadership, and I think those attitudes do lead to a destructive form of entitlement.
I also don't think the cause-and-effect story is really there. The one startup founder that I know personally that I've heard be called a douchebag is somebody that started the company early on in high school, that bootstrapped it up with his brother from money made by selling bootleg CD's at soccer practice, and never went to college. And the other >bad person< I know that started a startup isn't your generic entitled club president type -- he is, far more specifically, your basic clinical psychopath.
Also, to the degree that these people do exist, or to which this attitude has been inculcated into a group of people, the sink-or-swim situation of running a startup seems like a great place for them.