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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

"CEO" and "founder" are very different job descriptions. An MBA can be very useful for a peacetime CEO [1]. It is basically useless for a wartime CEO or founder (all of whom are wartime CEOs).

An MBA basically teaches you how to apply rational analysis and best practices to the running of an existing business unit. This works great during normal times, when your company has a competitive advantage, you know what it is, you have a large and growing customer base, and you are making a profit on every transaction. It works terribly when the default outcome, if you follow all the best practices and do everything you're supposed to, is that you'll fail miserably. This is the situation most founders are in - if their market opportunity were obvious to someone with an MBA, then someone with an MBA working for a big company with lots of resources would already have done it.

[1] https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo-2/

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That is a really strange theory. It is also demonstrably false.

Many of the founders of the top unicorns have MBAs (Grab, StitchFix, CloudFlare, etc) [1] Also, I wouldn't categorize building AWS from scratch as a "peacetime CEO" job.

1. https://poetsandquants.com/2016/02/24/38-mba-founded-unicorn...

Not sure how it's incompatible with your stats. If the degree is useless then you would expect MBA holders to have no advantage over non-MBA holders in founding companies. Not that MBA holders wouldn't sometimes be successful. You're missing a data point showing that MBA holders are more likely to succeed at founding startups, which I have yet to see anywhere.

Realistically, an MBA can be helpful to a startup founder if that founder lacks basic business acumen from prior education or experience (basic accounting, financial planning, marketing, etc.). It can also be a hindrance because MBA coursework tends to trivialize many of the core skills needed to be successful at starting a company in favor of the higher-level thinking and planning needed for large corporations (you won't learn how to make your first sale, for example, or how to hire your first employee, setup a billing system, etc.).

And quite a few of the CEOs who have presided over some of the biggest business disasters have MBAs.

That depends on the MBA program, and on the electives each student takes. Some focus heavily on innovation and entrepreneurship. There's a lot of variation.

https://www.scu.edu/bulletin/graduate/leavey-school-of-busin...

I think it comes a lot more to the individual person and not the academic background. A little bit like the meme that engineers make better managers of manufacturing companies. That nobody mention that with very few exception the whole VW management where engineers, Winterkorn being a professor with a eingineering PhD.

Something you might not have considered are the brand value and personal network aspects of an MBA. They're tremendously helpful to gain audiences or advice you might have a harder time accessing as an early stage entrepreneur.

You may also be surprised with the changes many MBA programs have made toward entrepreneurship. There are now incubators, cross-disciplinary product launch classes, and school affiliated venture funds.

Worth nothing that 'the type of education' is only one factor, the other being the 'the type of people' that do that kind of study, and their opportunity costs afterwards.

My Grad School peers mostly got decent jobs and it's hard to convince the wife/husband to let all of that go. Most people who make good corporate warriors may not make very good entrepreneurs at all.

But of course, so many do and add to that an MBA is definitely a signal of higher levels of motivation, education etc. which are positive signals.

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