Beware of MBAs: The business school curriculum teaches how to suck at startups

I think the point missed in here is that if you go into your MBA with a consulting, banking, etc direction, then you'll get all the lessons that go with that.

If you did an MBA with the express purpose of concentrating on making startups work, you'd concentrate on taking away the parts of that education that focus on entrepreneurship.

It's fashionable to diss the MBA but they contain a non-trivial amount of learning about finance, capital markets, legal and other aspects of business that would take a long time to pick up just by going through a startup.

I like to think of this topic using an automotive racing analogy: Fortune 500 companies are the formula 1 cars. They need a great big team to perform efficiently, and minor tweaks applied correctly can yield significant results. The MBAs are the specialists who work the electronics and the advanced controls for the race cars. A team working on a formula 1 car could find a way to increase down force by 5%, or they could install a GPS system to analyze turns and scrape 1/100s of seconds off of lap times, and that edge could help them win.

Startups are cars with a very different purpose. They are project cars, and they have 1 purpose: to go. Forget GPS systems and down force. These cars need tires and a working steering wheel. It would be a mistake to think about installing spoilers on a car that doesn't have all 4 tires, just as it would be a mistake to worry about ideal liquidity ratios in a startup. Entrepreneurs are the mechanics who decide to take on these 'project cars'. Eventually, as the car project develops and grows, specialists (MBAs) can be brought on to find the minor, yet precise changes that will improve the car's results.

I can't speak to the success rate of the engineering students, but I graduated from the business school in '07.

In my class about 10 of us started companies. There have been two successful exits and one is probably doing over $100MM revenue.

All in all, about 8 of the companies will be considered successful and 2 flops. Of the 10, the vast majority raised less than $500K in capital.

At some point, and it is happening already to a small degree, this problem will no longer exist. Top universities are catching onto the success of YC and will begin to offer programs of lesser magnitude, but similar intent. Once one of the big schools (Harvard, Stanford, etc) will declare victory then the rest of them will begin copying the model as well. I think places like the Stanford d school have some overtures in this direction, but they are not the final word. The bottom line is, the whole intention of an MBA is to credentialize businesspeople the way other professional degrees do (J.D.) etc. The conflict here is that startups are about near the exact opposite. Entrepreneurship is a recursive credential. You can only earn the title by doing the act itself, not some abstraction.

Your analogy works. Most hackers certainly don't belong in business school...but many hackers could benefit from an MBA's experience/education once their product has traction, users, whatever. An MBA as the first hire probably doesn't make sense. But an MBA to optimize sales/marketing/support might make a lot of sense...

People tend to forget that top tier MBA grads are (usually) incredibly bright and productive professionals.