How Should Business Schools Prepare Students for Startups?

Not mentioned in the video are a couple factors that probably influence the process in invisible and important ways:

1) At UH (and other universities I've checked on), the different departments are run as different business units, so trying to run mixed classes runs into the typical corporate politics of how funds are allocated, who gets credit, etc. We do have a video game design class that combines CS and creative media majors into one crossover class at the undergrad level, so I'm trying to gain insight on how that works at a pedagogical and administrative level.

2) Talking to the curriculum manager of our MBA program, he expressed that he didn't have any professors who would want to teach a multidisciplinary class, and he didn't have anyone he felt comfortable assigning to it anyway. When I asked him why, he said that business academia heavily discouraged multidisciplinary research, and publish-or-die culture has resulted in extremely "pointy" professors who are stellar single business discipline, but essentially worthless outside their skill silo. Because of this, he felt that a silo-breaker class would be either resource-intensive or ineffective.

We do have a couple "entrepreneurship" centers on campus, one oriented around tech (with a former technical SV-type manager), and one oriented around business. Sadly, they seem to be mutually exclusive for the most part, but I've been working on trying to build the connective tissue.

I do completely agree that business and engineering need each other, because I always see product without strategy or strategy that completely misunderstands the magical business properties of pure tech--and that's if the business kids are pitching tech at all. These two disciplines, at least at my school, are utterly ignorant of each other and it shows in the ideas they have. When it comes to preparing students for any kind of entrepreneurship, you need to have practitioners and managers mingling for it to work, and I doubt I'd ever go to a business masters that wasn't multidisciplinary. To this end, very happy I'm seeing things like Harvard's MBA/CS and the Stanford interdisciplinary programs pop up.

I doubt I'll get UH to see the light, but wish me luck. Hopefully the insights I got from administrators help someone look at the problem differently.

That being said, there was a small handful of people who were serious, committed, and willing to do whatever it took to get their company off the ground. As with all stereotypes, there is some element of truth along with countless counter examples. For MBAs, the core issue is a lot of ambitious, idea-generating, risk-averse people without technical/tactical skills on average, looking to do something risky with technical/tactical requirements.

As someone wanting to start my own company, I hated that I didn't have the technical chops to get even a basic prototype off the ground and didnt want to just another MBA with an idea and no ability to execute. Luckily, my school, Chicago Booth, began offering a Ruby on Rails coding class. From the first class, I got addicted to it and spent all my timing building out an idea, that I didn't even initially think was good, just so I could learn to code better.

When I released the idea, 60% of the school started using it in the first month. There is no substitute for being able to cheaply and easily get a workable prototype onto the market. As a result of having a real product and the ability to iterate on it, we made it much further than any of our competitors in our schools New Venture competition and ended up winning it and raising a seed round.

We are by no means successful and are still in the startup grind for sure, but without bringing the initial ability to get something real onto the market through some technical skills, we would have been dead in the water no matter what. Our product is now used by half of MBAs in the country ( https://www.transparentcareer.com ) and it would have never of happened without at least getting some basic technical skills.

MBAs can start companies and be successful at them, and some companies require way less tech than others. That being said, I think everyone would wind up being better off learning to code no matter who they are. There is nothing more empowering than being able to create something real instead of just a powerpoint presentation.

Now that I have a team of engineers, working with them is way smoother as I more deeply understand the development process and can understand how to spec things out better. Even if i'm not coding on a daily basis, its immensely valuable to at least know the basics.

If you are a master at business administration then you are a master at telling other people to make things, why would I want you to tell me what to do as a partner in a startup? You have to pay me for that kind of stuff.