Business School

“I think business score is actually a counter signal.”

“I describe business school for the elite and the aimless. Ooh. You're good at what you do, you're smart, you want to make money, you're disciplined, but you have no idea what you want to do. We all try to sound very focused in our business school applications,…”

“I mean, we always say the best business school is being in business. Like I find business school to be kind of a funny misnomer. I think it's maybe okay for the network, but actually I think a better network would probably be building things with other builder…”

“I also think going straight from college to business school, which I advise the students now, is you're really on three metrics. You need to make sure you're ready. Socially, you're going to be with students who are much older than you are on average. Academic…”

“Yes, definitely the latter, because very often strategy is, as it is taught by people who've never run a company, never implemented strategy.”

“And then like later I realized that like business schools are not really about founding companies or entrepreneurship. They're more about the middle management or the kind of the theory of like, how do you run a company, but not actually the practical aspects …”

“Business school doesn't teach you business. It teaches you management. Like, what you think of as Harvard Business School is actually a, you know, Middle management to senior management. Training program, right? That's what that is.”

“I think that that is somewhat commoditized. A lot of people have that. And a lot of people you end up interviewing who coming out of the top business schools or IOTs or whatever, Processing power intelligence is something you can take for granted.”

“Going to business school to become an entrepreneur is like reading a book about basketball history because you want to join the NBA. I agree.”

“I describe business school for the elite and the aimless. You're good at what you do, you're smart, you want to make money, you're disciplined, but you have no idea what you want to do. We all try to sound very focused in our business school applications, but …”

“This is why all my employees I had never went to business school. They never worked in an established management firm, and some of them never even had accounting. Because I find it's easier to train them than somebody who did.”

“The training aspect of it, the knowledge aspect of it, which is what's taught now in strategy in business schools generally sucks. It's gone on a crazy theoretical bent. The strategy academy as a whole has fallen in love with a theory called the resource-based…”

“If you took the other, the 49 other top business schools in America, and if asked the question, do you swear allegiance to the resource-based view of the firm? If you don't answer an enthusiastic yes, you have no chance of being hired. Zero.”

“I have this thing where I just, I really don't like to hire people who went to business school and I'm kind of anti-MBA because to me, if there's a funnel and it starts when you're like five years old and you ask, why is the sky blue? Why do people walk on two…”

“That's how the spreadsheet's not actually the business, you know, despite what you may learn in business school.”

“They teach theories now because it's so much easier to teach a theory than intellectual structure.”

“When you know you have an edge, you should bet heavily. You know you're right. And most people, they don't teach that in business school. It's insane. Of course, you got to bet heavily on your best bets.”

“And the traditional structure, the way I learned how to pitch in business school, I think the way most people did is what I call the arrogant doctor. So you have a problem, a pain, I have a solution, you know, a treatment, and I'm going to tell you why it's be…”

“I think one of the biggest problems with business school is it loves to tell people to set a business plan with objectives and goals. And like you have, the second you start with that, you have set yourself up for failure.”

“I think like business school is like the it's like the uncertainty pick where like people aren't willing to tolerate the like uncertainty of what comes next at that first pivot point in their career. And business school is like the easy the easy answer.”

“And then when I went and studied initially philosophy and business, I thought, This has really very little to do with what I've learned with my grandfather. You know, you learn about accounting, and you learn about all these different, you know, marketing stra…”

“So I'm like, you know what? I'm going to go to McKinsey. It's a business school, except they pay you.”

“And that's one of the complaints I've always had about business school, HBS in general. They teach you how to do the job you're going to have 30 years from now, not the job when you first come out of school.”

“All of the skills that are being taught are based on modern portfolio theory, which all of those, nearly all of those equations are in an APT framework or a linear regression framework, and even traditional optimization methods used for portfolio construction.…”

“OnDeck is basically like a modern day business school. So why do people go to business school? People go to business school because they want to build a network. They want to maybe learn about business and they're looking to kind of like pivot their career in …”

“There is nothing that's taught in business school classrooms that you are not capable of learning and understanding and applying on your own.”

“When you calculate the whole thing, there are, if I'm remembering correctly, Nine schools that have just passed the 400,000 dollar mark in terms of total cost of a program.”

“I watch a lot of other students who try to start companies while they're in business school not succeed, and I think part of it is they try to do everything well, and you just kind of have to choose at some point and say, this is going to be my number one”

“Fundamentals of poker should be a required class at every business school. You learn statistics in real life. You learn how to weigh risk reward. You get a crash course in human behavior, and you learn how to act when money is on the line.”

“Business schools do not teach the fundamental problems of business. I mean, that's pretty bad, right? What they teach are finance. What they teach is marketing to teach us HR. And as the great, greatest management thinker of all time, Peter Drucker said, there…”

“Business school, as an example, has taught you that redundancy is waste, and waste can be converted into profit, and profit is converted into compensation. And I think that is what people have really drank the Kool-Aid on. And so, you know, when they ran out o…”

“For a lot of people that I've connected with that are educated in the north, northeast or lived in New York City or San Francisco or have parents who have A little more access to the world of business business school could be a waste of time and a waste of mon…”

“If you go to business school, rule number one is that you have to listen to the customer and you have to give them what they want. But that's the basic, you know, thing that a business person will do. That's kind of the opposite of what an artist normally does…”

“And predominantly what's taught in business school is how to run a stable business, right?”

“I think that we teach marketing wrong at the business schools, because when we want to know whether there's a growth opportunity, we look at the numbers about How many products are being sold? What's that trajectory of market? But what's really interesting is …”

“I think if you, having a business school degree has helped me immensely in understanding the principles of accounting and revenue recognition and all, you know, like real basic fundamentals, finance cap tables, discount rating, discounted cash flow. These are …”

“I don't know that business school really trains you for it either. It tends to be an apprenticeship business”

“And history is almost never taught in business schools. It's all the live case studies. Or the case studies, you know, where the ending is known, and therefore implicitly, structurally looks predetermined.”

“It's hard for schools to recruit entrepreneurs to do this work, and so it's really hard to learn how to do a startup from someone who's never done a startup before, and that tends to be the case for the, a lot of people running these programs.”