MBA

“In a post LLM world, we feel MBAs will definitely have a lot more value especially engineers doing MBA as an MBA is lot more philosophical thinking understanding about business.”

“Some people said, Hey, why are you writing that in the essay? Because that's kind of counterproductive for MBA. But I don't believe so. Like MBA is a great place to start”

“It's addressing something I believe is real, which is, like, getting an MBA in real life and AI at, you know, pennies versus taking on extreme debt and getting an MBA from a high-class university. They think that logo Is going to get you financial opportunity …”

“Startups usually do not hire people with like MBAs and who would come from management consulting for their, in their mind you guys, you know, all about process and data and analysis, but as a startup, you do none of that, right? A startup is all about taking a…”

“Get a few people that believe in you to, and just get some capital together, or invest very small amounts even of your own capital, and just get going. I think that's more important than, you know, going to school and going to get your MBA, even though I got m…”

“That's an easy one for me is no, we there, it is a great two year period to build up a set of great relationships, but no, there's nothing on the business knowledge that you're going to come out of there. That is a fraction of what you would get from building …”

“You're going to look at the spreadsheet. And you're going to say that cell doesn't work. So the spreadsheet doesn't foot, right? It doesn't work. So I'm not going to do this idea, right? Cause you're just looking at it and analyzing it. I'm like an entrepreneu…”

“I have never bothered about whether this guy is from an IM or an MBA or this or that. Never bothered. I only look for results. Can this guy work with people? Can this girl work with people? Can they produce results? Never in my consideration has been a degree.”

“This is the worst one is, like, the gross margin, especially percentage.”

“Like, I'm, I almost never hire MBAs. And once in a while, if they do, it's despite their MBA.”

“I was in Stanford executive program, and it's a very, very selective program just for executives, CEOs. It's much more selective than MBA, much more selective.”

“MBAs have such an interesting reputation in tech. Most people just absolutely hate them.”

“I think MBAs make a lot of sense for people who are trying to break into a specific industry. Like if you are trying to break into private equity or you want to be a PM at Amazon or go into McKinsey, then MBAs have like your preset path and you just follow you…”

“I remember way back in the PayPal days, over 20 years ago, we had a rule that we weren't, wouldn't hire MBAs. We had a no MBA hiring rule.”

“That is like the professional managerial class. That's the MBA way. And that's useless in building great companies. You need people with strong opinions in my humble opinion.”

“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…”

“If I add up all those, I mean, we're putting probably somewhere between a hundred and a 150 MBAs into these companies per year.”

“One, I think jobs are just more valuable MBAs that pay you.”

“Well, personally, I'm not a big believer in MBAs except from if you have some kind of job and need to change direction, and you feel that, you know, I'm in the wrong place, I just need to completely do something else. Then an MBA is good. It's good as a kind o…”

“If you want to be a badass PM, I don't think you really need it. You can learn the skills that you need to learn through product-focused training, through being in the right situation, through learning from Jedi Masters at your company. If you want to be a CPO…”

“An MBA is, Is a non-risky move. It is seeking security, actually, by definition.”

“Like YC did the same thing. He's like, it's going to be easier for me to take badass engineers and teach them the basics of fundraising and hiring and firing than to take an MBA who knows everything about fundraising and hiring firing, but can't build shit. An…”

“If somebody says I'm going to Stanford Business School, generally you'll receive positive praise. Oh, that's awesome. But what they're really doing is not working for two years and spending a 150 to 200,000 dollars and not earning a salary.”

“Like you need like really talented technologists on founding teams. Like I really think it's like, we're in the technology industry. Like, you know, if you leave the MBAs alone, they're going to do like Casper mattresses, but for mattress pads this time, but t…”

“There's a strong anti MBA bias at that company. So which but there's only rare exceptions allowed.”

“I literally went back to get my MBA because I thought I'm starting a new company. I loved starting a company in college. It provides so much, so many resources and so much protection from like the real world. No one really expects anything of you yet. But you …”

“I also don't have an MBA. I don't have an Ivy League education”

“I think an MBA is basically worthless, it's not a good use of your time, I think you should be out building things.”

“It didn't make sense for me to quit my job and borrow a bunch of money, go back to school, you know, to come back to the kind of job I already had. I just wanted to learn what I needed to know to succeed. And so the personal MBA became a project where instead …”

“They come in indoctrinated into the notion that my job as a business person is to figure out into what category this problem that I'm facing falls and then apply that tool. Ah, this is a finance problem, so I will apply the capital asset pricing model, or this…”

“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…”

“I think school is often a waste of time, especially if you're in tech. My number one piece of feedback to people is, Get experience. If you want to be in business, start a business. Don't do an MBA.”

“Listen, outside of the VC community does give you some credibility. Like when you're selling to enterprise customers, for example. Two is that it's specifically the finance and accounting classes you take are incredibly helpful when you're building a business.”

“The much better model is for the engineer to have the business skills. For the engineer to be a top flight engineer, but also have the business skills to be able to start a company. And then the engineer hires the MBA as, you know, the head of marketing, or th…”

“The timing as to why is it today that we're going to see more masters and PhD engineering degrees at the CEO helm of companies than MBAs is because of those things. And it's taken a while for engineers like myself to build out positions in the venture capital …”

“So I've always joked that an MBA is the anti-entrepreneurship degree. And I say this really tongue in cheek because it equips you with so many, so much ability to say no. If your hunch is this is tough, You'll find many ways of corroborating that this is tough…”

“We gave MBAs resumes of potential job candidates. And in those resumes, those people were either told, said that they were, it was said about them that they were either dishonest in their personal lives, like to the significant other. They were dishonest at wo…”

“The counter argument that an MBA disqualifies you from participating meaningfully in the startup ecosystem is just not true. And there's actually just in my class in business school, Harvard business school, 2009, you had rent the runway, thread up cloud flare…”

“The much better model is for the engineer to have the business skills for the engineer to be a top flight engineer, but also have the business skills to be able to start a company, and then the engineer hires the MBA as, you know, the head of marketing, or the…”

“I think it's just that MBAs, because of their nature, may be more likely to fall into the spinning too much research time mistake as compared to a tech founder who's going to be more likely to jump right in and build something.”

“And I don't know many people in the Valley who would say that you learn more getting an MBA than you learn two years in the grind at an early stage startup.”

“I could say that if you're not going to a top five school, You are not technical and you want to get into tech startups. It makes no sense to me why you wouldn't try to get a job in an early stage company in a startup city.”

“People do not see the NBA as a startup. What is that called? It's not seen as like a positive resume item.”

“I see many times where there were MBAs, junior associated VCs, and coming to try to compete with us, but they always quickly failed after some great original boss.”

“It's better to learn from these resources than it is to just go out and pay, you know, a hundred grand for an MBA.”

“That the model of how you build an organization used to be quite mechanized. I have an MBA. They taught it to me. And it's worthless. None of the steps are true anymore.”