Category Archives: Business Education

What About Business Schools and Creativity?

Business Education, Teaching Business
Stanford Prof. James March

I’m generally an advocate of education over ignorance, but there is the issue of business schools and creativity.

A business professor’s wisdom

The best class I took at the Stanford Business School during my MBA years (1979-81) was taught by Professor James March, co-author of the book An Introduction to Models in the Social Science. It was about the same subject. He was funny. He was contrarian. He was brilliant. He had a mathematical model of a cocktail party that predicted how many people would be passed out at the end of the party, based on inputs including how many couples, how many singles, and, particularly important, how many more male singles than female singles. That may be too gender-specific for today’s world, but it was applicable 30 years ago.

I liked and respected Prof. March so much that in the middle 1980s I tried to get him to join me in what would have been a venture to create a game that teaches business. Prof. March didn’t join me and I didn’t create the new venture. I continued with my business plan consulting instead.

I’ve never forgotten the conversation we had over lunch that day. I can’t remember the exact words, of course, but Prof. March reminded me that there is an underlying conflict between education and creativity. He was an educator, but he was also a contrarian and a thinker, so he enjoyed flanking our standard assumptions.

Schools teach conformity

“Schools teach conformity,” he said. “Education is about reinforcing the supposed right way of doing something, meaning the way we’ve always done it, the way the establishment expects us to do it.” Schools taught that the world is flat until a renegade proved otherwise.

“New ideas come from people that haven’t been indoctrinated,” he said. This was of course before the phrase “think outside the box” came along, but he would have referenced that if we’d been later in time. Schooling is about learning how to think inside the box. If you believe this line of reasoning.

Here again, I run into paradox. I believe in education but I also believe what Prof. March suggests. Is the answer that you have to know the fundamentals before you transcend them?

Put Your MBA into Your Work, Not Your Title

MBA

I’m shocked to note that it’s been seven years since I posted Note to MBAs: Drop the Comma MBA, please! The point was exactly what the title implies, that people with MBA degrees ought not to use that degree as a title like CPAs and MDs do.  That one sparked some surprisingly (to me) animated comments.  I’m even more convinced of that seven years later. MBA business card

The key point:

I just got another email from somebody whose email signature is “So-and-so, MBA.” Which reminds me of the business cards, and letters, and promotional material I see where people brandish those three letters after their name.

I don’t think that “MBA” thing behind your name works out for you.

It’s not a matter of licensing and regulation, like MD or CPA. It’s just a master’s degree. In this country alone, accredited institutions grant several hundred thousand masters degrees every year. That’s not including the fake degrees.

So that MBA you earned? Put it on your resume, put it on your blog’s “About” page, and put it in the management team section of your business plan when seeking loans or investment. Use it to know what you’re talking about. But leave it off your name.

I tried, in that post, to clarify that I was against brandishing the degree as a title, not against getting the degree, or against those of us who have that degree. I wasn’t criticizing MBAs in general, just the practice of putting the three letters behind the name. (Although, I do cast some doubt on some facets of the MBA degree in other posts here, while I also recommend it for some people and in some circumstances. If you’re curious, check out the series of posts here.

Lots of comments

John Wren, Denver-based startups expert, added my favorite of the several dozen comments, with this one:

I put MBA after my name as a warning. 🙂

Others approached the idea with a whole lot less sense of humor and/or perspective. One comment starts with “What a LOAD OF RUBBISH!” Another blames MBAs in general for the 2008 financial meltdown. Several people defend the practice, while others join me and John Wren in making a bit of fun about it. Several people are offended as if I were attacking their education. I wasn’t.

Put it into your work, not your title

I think that the right way to show off an MBA degree is by using it to improve your work product. Show people that you have an MBA by using the skills, background, and techniques you learned to build better businesses, deal better with people, and make better decisions.

What do you think?

(Image: my thanks to Cam Development, business card software for windows.  I used one of their samples to create the business card example shown here.)

Does an MBA Help in Running a High-Tech Business?

Business Education, MBA, Starting a Business, ,

Question (on Quora): Does an MBA help in starting up and running a technology-based business? 

My Answer on MBA for High Tech

I have an MBA degree and I bootstrapped a software company past $10M annual sales and was a co-founder of another software company that went public in less than four years. And the truth is neither yes or no, but somewhere in between. The value of the MBA depends on who you are, what you want, what other options you have, what you give up, and where you are in career and the more important rest of your life, like relationships, having children, etc.

MBA degree for high tech business

My case with my MBA and high tech

My MBA degree made a huge difference to me as entrepreneur. I would never have managed without the general business knowledge I got in business school. Having a good basic idea of finance, marketing, product development, and organizational admin was essential to me. It changed my risk factors from too high to acceptable. I set out to build my business on my own without any savings or any investors and while being the sole income for my family (at that point we had 4 kids). Knowledge, in my case, reduced risk. So that’s a direct link to this question of whether having an MBA helps. I’m just one data point, but still … my experience is real.

For the record, my MBA wasn’t easy. It was a lot of sacrifice and a lot of risk. I did it at Stanford while married with 3 kids and paying my own way by consulting, supporting my family, without scholarship help. I quit a good job to do it, turned down a transfer from Mexico City to Hong Kong, which I had wanted for years. And I’m very grateful to my wife, who encouraged me to do it, and promised me she’d stick with me even if I failed.

Two important qualifiers

One important factor for me, which might be relevant for others, is that my MBA experience was rooted in the objective of changing careers. I wanted to change directions, not continue in the direction I’d been going. I’d been a business journalist and I wanted to move out of Journalism to business. I didn’t want to write about it; I wanted to do it.

Another factor for me that might help others is I didn’t expect magic. I was already 31 years old, married 9 years, father of 3. I didn’t expect to learn leadership, when and how to take risks, or how to deal with people (i.e. empathy) in a classroom. What I did expect to learn was the intricacies of finance and cash management, accounting, marketing, some sales (ugh – I’ve always hated sales), some product development, decision sciences, and basic analysis.

However, please don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying that the MBA is good for every entrepreneur or any specific entrepreneur or you, specifically, as you read this answer. I am saying that it was extremely good for me, in my case, and might be as well for somebody else in similar circumstances. Can you afford to do it? Do you have the time? Are you in a position to take advantage of it? Are you already full speed in a career you love or looking to pivot? All of these factors are important.

Three additional thoughts

  1. There’s no doubt that times have changed, and that the relative value of an MBA degree in 1981 is less than it is now. MBAs are much more common these days than they were then and it doesn’t take an MBA degree to understand supply and demand.
  2. MBAs need ripening before they get their full value. Some would say that it would be a good investment to buy fresh new recent MBAs for what they’re worth and sell them for what they think they’re worth. I’ve been an employer for 30+ years now and I like my MBAs much better when it’s their second or third job out of school, or a few years after school.
  3. I believe the MBA degree these days is a lot more valuable from one of the top schools – Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Northwestern, Babson (for entrepreneurs) and the like – than from second or third tier. The supply and demand factor has heightened the perceived difference.

Reflections on MBA experience

Business Education, MBA,

Gilded GraduationThe prestige of the MBA degree is tarnished quite a bit since I got mine in the early 1980s. And that’s for pretty good reasons. With the world of startups like it is, and the progress of high tech, there are some good arguments against stopping a career for two years to go back to school. Still, my two years with the MBA were the right thing for me, for my family, and for my entrepreneurship. Everything is case by case.

So I find myself reflecting on my own MBA experience, and MBAs as a stereotype, and what the MBA degree might or might not mean today. The following thoughts come in no particular order.

  1. The curriculum used to be a lot more about business analysis than about doing business. Things have changed for the better though, because now entrepreneurship is all over the MBA world now, and MBAs are much better off for it. When I was at Stanford University the entire “small business” curriculum was one course — an excellent course, but still, just one — taught by Steve Brandt.
  2. I screwed up the recruiting process myself and chose the wrong job for the wrong reasons. That story is in this blog as a stupid mistake. I was hardly the only one. I saw somewhere that 80% of the MBAs of my time changed jobs in less than a year after graduating.
  3. The two years I spent studying business were among the best of my adult life. My wife and I and our three kids moved from a fifth-floor apartment in Mexico City to a townhouse on campus at Stanford, for half the rent. I enjoyed the classes immensely.  Our kids had great elementary school on campus. We needed only one car.
  4. I had a friend a few years older than myself who already had the MBA degree when I met him, before I had thought of it. He always said “it’s just a union card. You get it so they pay you more.”
  5. After the first quarter as a full-time student I couldn’t take the pressure of the bank account going one way only, withdrawals and no deposits. So I worked as a market research consultant with Creative Strategies for the rest of my time studying. I made a  full-time consulting income, but  because I was a an early adapter of technology and I did most of my work at home, it was still a good time for family.
  6. By the end of the two years, some of my classmates were disappointed that they had been taught business analysis more than business. I wasn’t disappointed at all, I had learned what I went there to learn. I expected them to teach me stuff that lent itself to chalkboards and lectures and readings and they did.
  7. I wasn’t the typical MBA student. I was 31, married, had three children, and had supported my family for years as a business journalist in Mexico, making more money freelance than on salary. I figured that whether I knew how to deal with people or not, they weren’t going to teach me that; they were going to teach me what I wanted to learn, the analysis.
  8. Getting there was hard for us. It involved quitting a fairly good job in Mexico City and moving back to the United States without a job. I had just won a long-sought-after transfer to Hong Kong, which I had to turn down. That was a hard choice. I’ve never regretted it.
  9. It was expensive. I paid my own way.
  10. Samuel Johnson said that the ultimate happiness is anticipation of happiness rather than realization. During those two years studying, family life was close to idyllic for us so the present was really good, and the grapevine kept telling us that the future would be much better.
  11. It was a lot of work, but it was good clean work, and it made sense.
  12. I’ve dealt with some young people fresh out of business school with shiny new MBA degrees who were full of themselves, ignorant and arrogant. I’ve dealt with some who weren’t. Generalizations suck. Still, generally you want an MBA 10 years later, not in his or her first job out.
  13. I hated the group projects. I had a family to go back home to, and consulting work to do, and group projects had too many people who liked the social aspect of group meetings too much. I usually tried to negotiate a chunk of the project we could separate from the rest so that I could do my part on my own, without going to meetings.
  14. I had been doing business-journalist work for several publications, of which the most well known was Business Week (as McGraw-Hill World News correspondent for Mexico). I was amused sometimes that some of what I did after the MBA was very similar to what I’d done before the MBA, but for much more money.
  15. MBA studies are best for people who’ve had significant work experience first. I don’t know if that’s three years, or five, or seven, or what. I had been out of school eight years when I started.
  16. What’s with the people who put the letters onto their business cards and behind their names on websites, like they were CPAs or doctors or something? Isn’t that awkward? I always think if it isn’t MD or PhD or maybe CPA (for commercial reasons) then it makes me nervous to see it there. Is that just me or what?
  17. Final thought about MBAs: I deal today with a collection of very smart people between the ages of 30 and 40 who have picked up so much business savvy in 10 or more years of high-tech business that I don’t think they should go back to school and get an MBA degree. I do wish there were a test somewhere, like the GED for high school, so these people could take the test and get the [expletive deleted] MBA seal of approval they deserve.

So how to conclude? It’s up to you, and your situation, whether it’s right for you. And, at the very least, don’t hold the MBA against those who have one.

Does Business Education Stifle Creativity

Business Education, MBA,

Business Education vs. Creativity

Education

Does business education stifle innovation and creativity? You probably already know Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, from 2006, Do Schools Kill Creativity? It’s one of the five or so most viewed and most discussed TED talks. His basic idea is that school focus too much on the academic, not enough on other kinds of intelligence. He was talking about classic elementary education mostly. What about business, and business education?

I have trouble myself with some of the recent themes about education and entrepreneurship. I shudder when people ask, “Why get an education if I’m going to be an entrepreneur?” And then there’s the other one, “you can’t teach entrepreneurship.” I’m somewhere in the middle on these controversies; I believe general education makes life better; that the value of education isn’t to be measured in earnings dollars after education; that a liberal arts education is great preparation for entrepreneurship; and that an MBA degree was useful to me and can be to others, but isn’t a universal requirement, by any means. I’ve posted here previously 5 things business schools can teach and 5 things they can’t. And also, can business schools teach entrepreneurship?

The James March Question

But there’s also this idea, always in the back of my mind: the talk I had with James March, way back in the 1980s, about how higher education teaches us to do what everybody else has done, not to do things differently.

The best class I took at the Stanford Business School during my MBA years (1979-81) was taught by Professor James March, co-author of the book An Introduction to Models in the Social Science. It was about the same subject. He was funny. He was contrarian. He was brilliant. He had a mathematical model of a cocktail party that predicted how many people would be passed out at the end of the party, based on inputs including how many couples, how many singles, and, particularly important, how many more male singles than female singles. That may be too gender-specific for today’s world, but it was applicable 30 years ago.

I liked and respected Prof. March so much that in the middle 1980s I tried to get him to join me in what would have been a venture to create a game that teaches business. Prof. March didn’t join me and I didn’t create the new venture. I continued with my business plan consulting instead.

I’ve never forgotten the conversation we had in his office that day. I can’t remember the exact words, of course, but Prof. March reminded me that there is an underlying conflict between education and creativity. He was an educator, but he was also a contrarian and a thinker, so he enjoyed flanking our standard assumptions.

“Schools teach conformity,” he said. “Education is about reinforcing the supposed right way of doing something, meaning the way we’ve always done it, the way the establishment expects us to do it.” Schools taught that the world is flat until a renegade proved otherwise.

“New ideas come from people that haven’t been indoctrinated,” he said. This was of course before the phrase “think outside the box” came along, but he would have referenced that if we’d been later in time. Schooling is about learning how to think inside the box. If you believe this line of reasoning.

Here again, I run into paradox. I believe in education but I also believe what Prof. March suggests. Is the answer that you have to know the fundamentals before you transcend them?

We’re Raising Girls to be Perfect, Boys to be Brave

Business Education, Leadership, Technology, ,

Friday video, a TED talk, Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani is out to change the way the world looks at girls, tech, and girls in tech. Her non-profit Girls Who Code inspires high school girls to study computer science.  She aims to enroll one million women in the program by 2020 — and tech has stepped in to help: Google and Twitter are backers, and engineers at Facebook, AT&T and others have signed on as mentors.  Here’s a quote:

Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We’re taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A’s. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars and then just jump off headfirst. And by the time they’re adults, whether they’re negotiating a raise or even asking someone out on a date, they’re habituated to take risk after risk. They’re rewarded for it. It’s often said in Silicon Valley, no one even takes you seriously unless you’ve had two failed start-ups. In other words, we’re raising our girls to be perfect, and we’re raising our boys to be brave.

For the original on the TED site: http://www.ted.com/talks/reshma_saujani_teach_girls_bravery_not_perfection

 

My Dumb MBA Mistake

Advice, Business Mistakes, Business Stories, MBA,

I’ve made a lot of mistakes. You can’t build a business from scratch without making mistakes. It’s an entire category on this blog, more than 150 posts. This dumb MBA mistake wasn’t my worst, but it’s one of the easiest to explain afterwards, and I hope one that might help others avoid making it too. There is a moral to this story.

Mexico-City-Kainet-Flickr-ccIt was August of 1981, early morning, in the office of John Lutz, managing partner of McKinsey Management Consulting in Mexico City. I was three months out of Stanford with an MBA degree, working for McKinsey Management Consulting in Mexico City.

The McKinsey offices sat in a very stylish high-profile office building overlooking a critical freeway junction over Chapultepec Park, linking the fancy Las Lomas residential area with Polanco and the Paseo de Reforma main business district. The streets were wet from rain overnight, and the freeway was, as almost always, jammed. The sky was dense, a mixture of rainclouds and smog.

I needed to quit. It was so embarrassing. I didn’t like to see myself as the archetypical fancy MBA blowing off the first job. I was 33 years old, married, and my wife was expecting our fourth child. I was way too mature for this stuff. But still …

I had arranged a job waiting for me with Creative Strategies International in San Jose. From where I was, returning back to the San Francisco peninsula, Silicon Valley, seemed like returning from exile back to paradise. I liked Creative Strategies, and liked living back in the states. I wanted out of McKinsey.

I really didn’t like the job with McKinsey. It was stupid to have taken it. It was a job meant for a 26-year-old single person blinded by ambition and unencoumbered by relationships. Like most professional firms, success involved putting up with a corporate culture that spent 12 to 14 hours a day in the office, whether or not there was work to be done. The firm actively discouraged families by encouraging long-term business travel but without families, and by running 5-day strategy meetings at beach resorts and forbidding families coming along, even at the family’s own expense. I was not supposed to disagree with partners on … well, you get the idea.

I certainly didn’t belong. I’d been entrepreneurial for 10 straight years, making my own way with freelance journalism and, later, my own consulting, and I wasn’t up to faking awe for the partners. And as a family, we didn’t belong in Mexico City. I had loved that place for nine years in the 70s, it had been good to me, but I was done. My wife is Mexican, she grew up in Mexico City, and had family there, but she was tired of it too. The city was too big, too hard to deal with. We had left in 1979 and shouldn’t have gone back in 1981. I fell for the money and prestige, stupidly, because it wasn’t enough to keep me.

So, back in the office with John Lutz, did I tell him why I was leaving? That I didn’t like the job, had made a bad decision, didn’t like Mexico, I’m sorry, it won’t work.

No. I didn’t. I told him I needed a lot more money.

This is one of the best arguments ever for telling the damn truth, even when it’s embarrassing. I’m still embarrassed, but I’m older now, and, well, I think this is a good lesson to share.

So they gave me more money, and then how dumb did I look?

I still left, and I left looking really stupid. Why didn’t I just tell the truth in the first place?

So there’s the moral to the story. You’ll be in a situation where you’re tempted to slant away from the truth to make it easier, but remember before you do how bad you’ll look if the other side answers the wrong issue, forcing you to admit it was never the real problem. So here there is. It bothered me for a long time but that was 25 years ago or so, and hey, I’ve made a lot of other mistakes since, the sting has worn off on this one. I hope you find the story useful.

(Image: Mexico City via Kainet Flickr CC)

Two Big Problems with MOOCs

Business Education, , ,

You know of MOOCs, right? Massively Open Online Courses. It seems like such a great idea, a solution to education, productize courses and make them available. If only it were just about the learning. We have Udemy, Udacity, Khan Academy, and dozens of others. After all, learning is learning. It doesn’t take tens of thousands of dollars in tuition. Does it? But there are two big problems with MOOCs.

I believed in the allure of massive online learnings since the early 1980s when I was first exposed to it. The idea has always made sense. We could spread learning out into the world much faster using technology.  Reading. Listening. I taught myself computer programming (early 1980s BASIC, then Pascal, then Visual Basic). So of course I see the value. And I’m even offering my own MOOC right now, as author, with my course on Lean Business Planning hosted by the Economist Group at Learning.ly.

Problem One: MOOCs and Certification. Degrees Validate.

The first problem is about certification. A degree is certification. It means somebody followed the rules, completed tasks, buckled down for a period of years. It means an institution looked over their shoulder while they did. A college degree means so much more than just learning. Completely aside from the learning, it’s a standard used by employers and clients. It means an acceptable minimum of doing hard things, meeting deadlines, getting stuff done. And as a society we’ve confused the learning with the degree.

NYU prof and entrepreneur writer Clay Shirky writes (In David, yes. This. — Medium):

 “The jury is still out on the long-term effect of MOOCs, but one thing we now know for certain — the unbundled value of the content of an Ivy League classroom is $0. Similarly, the job premium for getting an excellent education but falling one credit short of a degree is smaller — considerably smaller — than getting a mediocre education with a degree. Certification, not learning, is the thing the market says is worth paying for. There are still fields where there are alternate-to-college certificates (physical therapy) and even quasi-collegiate training programs (cooking schools.) There are still fields where you can apprentice and work your way up (restaurants). But the big arc of work in the U.S. since the early 1970s has been to group all work into two categories — pays well, requires degree, and pays badly, does not require degree.”

Problem Two: MOOCs and Education and Learning Together

The second problem is the common confusion of education with earning power. I posted earlier this month about the common lie that pits education against entrepreneurship, as if they are opposites. Underneath that lie is the problem of people thinking education, the college degree, is just about increasing earning power. The assumption is that the value of education can be calculated by subtracting tuition costs from the increase in future earnings. But it’s not that simple. Unfortunately education is more than learning, and more than earning power.

Is the MOOC ever going to really disrupt education? I don’t know. I found this infographic interesting:

History of MOOCs

Does Business Education Keep You in a Box?

Business Education, , ,

Last week, I posted a rant about the stupid meme that pits entrepreneurship against education, as if young people are supposed to choose one or the other, but not both. I called it Young Entrepreneurs: They are Lying to You.

But I like paradox, and I like uncertainty, and I also like to remember that you could argue that education—especially business education—teaches people how to do what their elders did. It teaches them to color inside the lines. It teaches them to think inside the box.

On the other hand, you have to know what you’re rejecting to reject it. People who learned the classics are better positioned to reinvent them with something new.

Or are they? What do you think?

Young Entrepreneurs: They Are Lying to You

Advice, Business Education, Starting a Business, , ,

All over the web, on Q&A sites, blog posts, and so on, in panels and conferences, and in the occasional book, know-it-all alleged experts are lying to young entrepreneurs about the value of education. They sprout clichés that are unrealistic, impractical, and that when taken to an extreme, are even tragic.

Lie: A startup is better than an education.

orangutang_istock_000003420564xsmallIt is so not true, but sadly also so widely believed.

They say education is a waste of time. They say that a “real” entrepreneur skips school to do a startup now. You’re in high school and they tell you being an entrepreneur is a viable alternative to getting an education. You’re in college and they tell you to drop out. They’re tricking you.

That’s crap perpetuated by wishful thinking. Sure, starting a business sounds better to you than sitting in a classroom or doing homework. And, when studying bogs you down—as it does at some point for all of us—they tempt you with this lie you can turn to instead: “You don’t have to do this. You’ll just be an entrepreneur. Way more fun.”

Tragic? Yes. They throw you off track. Tragedy is what might have been, but isn’t because something—lies, maybe laziness (that’s what makes those lies work)—got in the way. I learned that in a classroom at college. They are like those beautiful sirens—mythological Greek ladies, sexy as hell, singing from the sidelines—who lured sailors off course and into the rocks.

But no, wait. You don’t have an education, so you have no idea what that reference is about. Unless you saw it in some low-grade movie.

[see-also]Should Entrepreneurs Attend Business School?[/see-also]

Truth: Get your education first.

Don’t kid yourself: You get the education when you’re young because it makes your life better.

First, it means doing something hard, something that takes a few years, and that builds you up. You do homework, you take tests, you write papers. You lose sleep turning work in on time. You grow. You face challenges and overcome them. The best path goes uphill sometimes. You can’t always take the easy route; you’ll end up nowhere.

Second, you learn to think, digest information, communicate, discuss ideas, evaluate options, and make decisions. You acquire skills and mindsets that make you better.

Third, it’s about options. Ten and 20 years will go by really fast. If you have a degree, then you have options. You have more choices. If you don’t get an education, someday there will be a thirty-something-year-old person living in your body, cursing you.

And, by the way, study what you like doing. I majored in lit, then did journalism in grad school. Ten years later, I went to business school. I ended up a software entrepreneur, writing my own code in the beginning. Your business success—or lack of it—isn’t what you learned or didn’t learn in school. It’s who you are. Life is way better with an education, but it doesn’t have to be a business education. Your education is part of who you are. Business is fine if you want to study it, but if not, no sweat. You can still do your own business later.

Yes, there are an extremely rare few who have earned the right to scoff at education. Peter Thiel, for one; nobody can doubt his credentials. He’s not just another amateur expert reading what everybody else says. And yes, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and a few other rare exceptions. Each of them is one in several million. And all three of them were dragged out of education by one of the biggest deals of the last 100 years. Rumor has it that Jobs actually got the education by auditing—without getting the paperwork—at Reed College. And you won’t find either Gates or Zuckerberg claiming others should drop out. And you aren’t them. They are exceptions, not the rule.

Don’t risk real life betting on yourself as that one in a million. Give yourself options. Look at the odds.

Give yourself time. Startups take seasoning.

In the real world—for the rest of us—actually starting a business takes seasoning first. You need some time. Work as an employee, keep your eyes open. The right time will come. It’s not one of those “now or never” situations until you pass 60 or so. Most of us need a decade or so in the work world, at least, before we’re ready to start our own business. I was 33 when I went out on my own, and 45 when it finally took off.

A few decades ago, before this craziness started, I took a course in entrepreneurship from Steve Brandt, at the Stanford Business School. Look him up on Amazon. It was a privilege I still appreciate.

Toward the end of the course, he paused, looked up at the lot of us, and said (something like): “Listen. I’m not saying you’re supposed to pass this class, graduate, and go start a business. That’s not realistic. You’re too young. You need more experience. So, if you’re serious about this, what you do now is choose the stream you want to swim in. Take a job in an area that interests you. Wait until you’re ready.”

A few decades later I was teaching entrepreneurship part-time, having built my own business, when one of my students asked me how he could set up a business in coffee roasting right out of school. He wasn’t the typical undergrad. He was married and in his middle twenties. I told him to work with a coffee roaster first. He did, for two or three years. Today, about 10 years later, he and his wife own a successful multi-location coffee roasting business called Back Porch Coffee in Bend, Oregon.

[see-also]10 Lessons Learned in 22 Years of Bootstrapping[/see-also]

Data? You want data?

Still, you want more?

If you do get that education, you’ll have a huge advantage over the uneducated in distinguishing data that matters from data that doesn’t. So you’ll realize I’m right. But for a quick data fix, check out what the Kauffman Foundation discovered when they analyzed 479 successful high-tech startups. Here’s what they say:

  • The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five.
  • The vast majority (92 percent) of U.S.-born tech founders held bachelor’s degrees. Additionally, 31 percent held master’s degrees, and 10 percent had completed PhDs. Nearly half of all these degrees were in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related disciplines. One third were in business, accounting, and finance.
  • U.S.-born tech founders holding MBA degrees established companies more quickly (in thirteen years) than others.
  • Those with PhDs typically waited twenty-one years to become tech entrepreneurs, and other master degree holders took less time to start companies than did those with bachelors degrees (14.7 years and 16.7 years, respectively).
  • U.S.-born tech founders holding computer science and information technology degrees founded companies sooner after graduating than engineering degree holders (14.3 years vs. 17.6 years). Applied science majors took the longest (twenty years) to create their startups.

Conclusion: They are lying to you.

Before you swallow entrepreneurial advice from anybody, ask first whether they’ve ever built a business. And even then, don’t believe them; think about it, and decide for yourself.

Don’t believe me either. Look around you.