People on HN crap all over MBAs, but these are the types of problems many of them have been trained to solve.
It's important to be aware of the necessity to perform those business functions that coders probably would rather not bother with, but once that happens, I find that technical people tend to make much, much better judgment calls than their business school superiors.
In reality, it's rare to find people who're daring enough to apply simple rationality across most or all spectra, regardless of their background. Unfortunately, an MBA seemingly does very little to mitigate this, and it's the core problem.
Yes, people could hypothetically learn, but most don't. I don't understand why we've all fooled ourselves into believing that four years of rote memorization and arbitrary compliance will do anything. I guess it being a much more fundamental problem is scary, because as simple as it may be, it's apparently quite difficult for most people to change.
We have a big problem with our educational and hiring cultures.
An MBA inoculates somebody from making poor decisions just as much as anybody having expertise in any specific field. As you would agree, nobody is beyond making a poor decision.
Let's also be clear than an MBA is a broadly defined credential, as there are a host of specializations (including Human Resources management, Marketing, Finance, etc) that are often bundled within the "degree". However, from what was described in the Everpix case, I am confident that somebody with the right mix of educational training in early-stage venture management (MBA w/entrepreneurship concentration) and smarts could have added value.
I'm not sure it's specific to programming, but I find it dismaying to see how many solved problems we still need to fight with every day just because the people that originally wrote the code never paused to think enough about the theory behind it all.
I dropped out, or semi-dropped out because I wanted to be a frontend/UI guy and learning shit like C++ and basic C/PERL/PHP <3 (seriously) for two years, while paying 10k/year, was super pointless.
I'm saving now for a proper degree, and the rent to go along with it. Probably going to do electrical or computer engineering, because that, you can't really learn online like you can HTML/CSS/JS.
University is an outdated model that's never really been applicable to the "real work" that needs to occur in an economy. Not sure why everyone decided it needed to become a general thing after WWII.
The idea that it is inefficient is what I find so interesting, because from my point of view it's entirely the opposite. For most people a degree will greatly improve their ability to learn new things. It will expose them to a whole host of thoughts, ideas, and areas of exploration that they would otherwise never touch.
The thing is, I don't have a degree. I have a LOT of one (well two actually). I feel that it's ok, because the last 30 hours or so that I'm missing are basically all computer science. That's the stuff I've been able to learn.
Still I can't imagine not having the college education that I do have. I use what I learned in psychology almost every day (absolutely essential for anyone trying to run a company). I use the lessons learned in history and literature to guide my decision making. Philosophy has greatly influenced HOW I interact with others and informs the type of team that I want to have.
College made me a much better entrepreneur and it did it only four years! Give me that experience every day over someone who skipped college.
Now, can you get all of that elsewhere? Of course. You can learn to program. That's easy. You can read every day. Of course. But unless you are a remarkable human being (and they do exist), you'll never achieve the breadth of knowledge that comes with a degree.
Hell I'm all for restructuring how we think about education. The answer isn't to eliminate it. Instead lets decouple the skills training aspect. Liberal arts degrees for everyone!
Who do you want to run your company?
A guy with no MBA but a 6 year history as CEO of a successful company, or a guy with 6 years of academic training and a MBA, but no history of ever running a company?
Same for coders. What do you want, the guy who has coded in a similar environment for 6 years, or the guy who spent 6 years in academia being taught to code with no experience on any project outside of academics?
The two primary motivations for getting an MBA are completely unrelated to obtaining an "education":
1. Career transformation (i.e. you're a marketer that wants to go into banking.. basically impossible to get interviews without going to bschool)
2. Obtain a professional network
"Learning" is really a tertiary priority.
So, didn't their investor have any MBAs? These are also the kinds of problems VC investors are supposed to advise on, to protect, you know, their investment.
But MBA are like economists, they all have different ideas on how to advance, and it is very hard to actually hard to test them, takes a long time to see if they were actually correct, if they fail they have a good reason, and it all sounds like something you could have worked out anyway.
The fact also remains that the vast majority of people I know who got an MBA did it for the network, not for the education.
Deleted comment
Not all of them can possibly fail for completely unique reasons.
Almost every job has quite a bit "on the job" learning that you won't get in your academic studies. An MBA still teaches a lot of the skills, whether they be in finance, business planning, networking, IP issues, or presenting, that are useful for entrepreneurs. I imagine an MBA focused specifically on entrepreneurship would have even more useful stuff in the curriculum. Would be great if someone with such a qualification could chime in. A friend of mine with an MBA had one course where the main project was to basically to development a business from scratch and pitch it to real investors. Several students went on to launch those businesses after school.
Just replace the word "Entrepreneurship" with "Sales" (which is similar) and perhaps you can understand.
A typical MBA involves the study of topics such as marketing, finance, risk management, accounting, economics, statistics, operations, HR, organizational dynamics, business law, and strategy.
Many of these can easily be adapted to be more useful for entrepreneurs. A finance class can focus on venture capital more than the bond market. A marketing class can focus on new product development more than the promotion of existing products. A law class can deal with the issues most relevant to startups. The accounting needs of a startup exec are different than those a future partner at Deloitte. etc.
As a clear example of the type of content that an entrepreneurial class could cover, Steve Blank's book Four Steps to the Epiphany originated not as a book, but as the notes for his class at Haas.
I'm not saying that hiring an MBA would have been a magic fix for Everpix, but when looking at the business as a whole, the product looked great (despite its lack of support for non-JPEG formats, but that's more of a personal nitpick) and there was engineering talent to continue building the product. However, the part of the article I quoted above indicates that the team lacked the business talent to successfully find a market for the product (or to identify that there wasn't a market and pivot while they still had cash left).
Also, every startup has tons of different problems at micro level even though macro themes are consistent (e.g. getting new customers etc.). It will be hard to generalize problem solving across startups.
I agree that Everpix couldn't find scalable business model for their product. But what I'm saying is you may not necessarily need MBA to find market/business model.
I don't see why. Startups aren't some magical beast unmatched anywhere else in the world. They're small businesses.