Comment by chermi
19 hours ago
I would never recommend an MBA for someone smart enough to get a technical degree, if their goal was a technical start up.
Maybe buddy up with some MBAs while in grad school, take something like a mini-mba program while there.
Can you elaborate on why you would _never_ recommend an MBA for a technical individual? I'm not opinionated here, despite recommending the opposite above, just curious on your reasoning. A "success story" is someone like Khan Academy founder Salman Khan who has an MEng and MBA.
I guess mainly opportunity cost, marginal gains, and relative abundance of MBAs. I could be dead wrong, completely open to it being bad advice.
You can learn as you go, and have someone more experienced and especially more interested handle a lot of the business side (i understand that handling everything by yourself is optimal in the limit of infinite capacity and time, because of lossy transmission).
One of the main things in MBA is case studies, right? No better case study-like info than talking to other founders and advisors you're going to find faster becoming a founder. I don't think learning the history of Amazon, for example, is not valuable. But time is limited.
Learn the business stuff as it comes, maybe front load info about cap tables, VC mechanics, basic accounting, DCF, basic marketing and gtm and such. Read some of the oft-recommended books on him. Also note in all of the above you can narrow in on material particular to your case, whereas MBA is more focused on larger corporations and established business and business types, because that's where most of the MBAs go.
Now you may ask why this doesn't apply to a PhD? Well it does to some extent. But the knowledge and experience from an MBA is much easier to gain outside of school than that of a PhD, assuming a good PhD program, advisor, and experience.
Maybe I'm discounting the value of MBA connections, but I think those are highly concentrated in the very top programs.
Edit- the question for a founder is largely what do you bring to the table few others can. But I admit you want as many edges and basic competencies in as many relevant domains as possible, if only to better understand what the people in charge of those domains in your company are saying. But you can't know it all, especially in the beginning. I just don't think 2 years in an MBA program is the most efficient route to gaining all of that.