Category Archives: Business Education

New Entrepreneurial Seal of Approval

Angel investment, Business Education, Starting a Business, , , ,

Adeo Ressi doesn’t like what he calls a slanted field on the deals entrepreneurs get from investors. He says (I’m quoting):

Honestly, I think that the entrepreneur gets a raw deal today, and that this has gotten a lot worse since I started in 1994. Entrepreneurs are victims of a lot of predatory and exploitative behavior.

This has been bad for a while, but it’s gotten much worse. And it hurts the country, and the economy. We need to fix the availability of capital for entrepreneurs.

That led to The Funded Founder Institute, a four-month, $450 program to run selected entrepreneurs (including, by the way, wanna-be entrepreneurs) through weekly sessions with mentors and experts, ending with a certification that should smooth the path to investment. Microsoft BizSpark scholarships are available too, to pay the $450.

Adeo is serious about smoothing the path for founders. He says:

If we could eliminate all the headaches that the modern bureaucratic layering adds to start a company, and allow these founders to focus on the core business challenge, the likelihood of success increases dramatically. We want them learning how to do it right.

A brief interruption before I go on: this looks like a really good program to me, even though it’s brand new, and not certified formally by anybody else. Adeo has a good reputation, knows a lot of the right people, and he’s done some important things before. I think the certification he’s offering is likely to be very valuable. So if you’re interested apply now. Applications close for the first session, which starts this month, May 9. The application costs $50.

Look at some of the mentors already on board. Several are major Web names, founders or CEOs of Scribd, Mahalo, Socialtext, and so on. And Adeo told me has many more, including other mentors as well known as some of these, in the wings.

Adeo himself gives this program a lot of credibility. He’s the founder and main force behind TheFunded.com, a site I’ve posted about before, entrepreneurs reviewing investors. He got his skeptical view of investors the hard way, building companies. Game Trusts, one of his more recent efforts, won $15 million in venture capital and exited with acquisition by Real Networks.

He’s serious about leveling the playing field. The institute has posted sample startup documents including suggested deal terms more favorable to entrepreneurs than most. And the institute is offering to arbitrate disputes.

It’s also taking a piece of the action, which it’s hoping to reinvest in the long-term health of the program. Adeo says there will be warrants, linked to equity, as a “vehicle of valuable attribution.” That’s for “value as a sign to the mentors and the founders. And 60% of the warrant value goes right back to the participants. The remaining 40% is held by the institute as a value play.”

Don’t Shade Your Eyes, Summarize

Business Education, Business Plan Marathon, Venture Contests, , ,

What if you had to take the classic business plan, developed for an MBA-level venture competition, and shrink it down to 10 pages?

Last Friday I spent a fun and fascinating day as a semi-finals judge at the University of Oregon New Venture Competition. My part of the program was evaluating four ventures developed by MBA students from Clemson, Northwestern, Penn State, and Michigan, along with three other judges. That was one of five flights, so there were 20 teams, selected from more than 100 entrants.

The new rules for this year gave them 10 pages for the business plan, plus up to 10 pages for appendices. The judges loved it, of course, because we have to read all the plans. The teams had mixed feelings.

Summarize. In this context, the venture competition, with teams of smart MBA students, it should have been duck soup (although that particular expression isn’t that popular at the University of Oregon, because the home team is the Ducks).

Keep the highlights. Stick to the headlines. Summarize. I don’t care if you’re the next big thing, with an unimaginably exciting new idea and a great team, you can still create a meaningful summary in 10 pages.

Start with a one-page summary. Then tell a story about the need, and your solution, your market, your secret sauce, your strategy, and your great team. Add in a financial summary, and don’t forget to highlight your capital needs, valuation, and exit strategy. If you do no more than 3 paragraphs in any one of these 10 main topics, you ought to be able fit that in 10 pages using a lot of bullet points and white space. Make it an attractive document that the judges, who tend to have older eyes, can read. Leave some space for some snappy graphics, a bar chart or two, and then include the financials in more detail in the appendices.

Some of the teams struggled too much with the page limitation. Some chose the dark-side option, filling the page with dense, small text. Some skipped important topics.

As we get used to these competitions, with page limitations growing more common, I’m expecting more teams to realize that there ought to be a master plan, from which these summary plans, and the presentations, and the elevator speeches, are just alternative output.

Once they get that, they should then start thinking more about the combined communication impact of the plan, the presentation, and the other elements. Can they summarize strategy briefly in a plan, and then explain it more in a presentation? I think so.  The plan and the presentation obviously overlap, but they both don’t have to cover exactly the same territory.

So today my business plan judging marathon month continues. After the event in Portland over the weekend, this evening I’m going to a three-hour meeting of the Willamette Angel Conference, reviewing business plans, listening to presentations, doing due diligence on plans.  On Thursday I leave for Houston, to judge the Rice University Business Plan Competition.

Rethinking Business Schools After the Fall

Business Education, Business Ethics, , , ,

Blame the business schools? As the culprits roll out of the fancy offices in New York and Washington, it’s hard to resist the temptation. There have been several thoughtful pieces on that in the last couple months, particularly the New York Times on blaming the business schools, and Are Business Schools to Blame posted late last month on a Harvard Business School blog. If you care about business education, for whatever reason, read both of these. The first is a bit longer than most blog posts, but thorough, well researched, and significant. The second includes a long string of thoughtful comments.

I care about business education. I think there are serious issues here, and a chance, maybe, to use this crisis to promote some change for the better.

The Times’ piece raises serious issues:

Critics of business education have many complaints. Some say the schools have become too scientific, too detached from real-world issues. Others say students are taught to come up with hasty solutions to complicated problems. Another group contends that schools give students a limited and distorted view of their role — that they graduate with a focus on maximizing shareholder value and only a limited understanding of ethical and social considerations essential to business leadership.

The Harvard follow-up cites three underlying problems (and I’m paraphrasing, here; the words are mine, summarizing):

  1. The traditional business school curriculum separates management from leadership. Management is analytical. Leadership is fuzzy.
  2. Business school lore and legend is about making money. Get an MBA, get rich.
  3. Business schools aren’t owning up to the possibility. The actual phrase is “There has been little contrition on the part of those involved in MBA education after the crisis.” Hard to argue with that. At least Harvard is there.

I see a whole lot of truth in most of this. And I believe in education in general, and I loved the two years I took to get the Stanford MBA, and I wouldn’t change a thing about that time (from 1979 to 1981). I teach one class a year at the University of Oregon business school. So I am involved in all this. And I do think there’s room for a lot more change. And good and bad news.

The Bad News

So much of what they’re saying is, at least from my point of view, mostly true.

Business schools tend to train people to be consultants and middle managers. In my class at Stanford we almost all wanted to be management consultants. Those were the best jobs. From what I can tell, that’s still true, and at all the good schools.

That idea of minding the stockholders interests, blindly, is very deeply rooted. It’s a very powerful rationalization. “Oh well,” they say, as they make the short-sighted, environmentally insensitive, socially insensitive, and even borderline unethical decision, “our job is to mind the share price.”

And the share price, meanwhile, drives very short-term views. The share price doesn’t often reward the strategic decision that sacrifices short term bumps for long-term health.

Business ethics are too often an afterthought. They should be at the core of business strategy, wound in and absorbed in product and market strategy, but they aren’t. They’re separate.

The Good News

The good news is the tremendous boom in teaching about entrepreneurship. It’s the absolute rage in business schools. Entrepreneurship programs are the bright new thing everywhere.

When I was at Stanford, there was only one course on anything related to small business or entrepreneurship. It was called Small Business Management, taught by Steve Brandt. It was a really good review of the startup process, the business plan, and getting investment. It was my favorite course. But it was also the only one offered that had anything to do with entrepreneurship. Today Stanford has a booming center for entrepreneurship and some amazing activities related to entrepreneurship: speaker series, videos, and so on.

And that’s the rule, not the exception.

Furthermore, people inside the schools are waking up to the growth in green business, social entrepreneurship, sustainability, and so on. I was at MERC 2009 the week before last: put on by the George Mason University Entrepreneurship Center, focusing on sustainability. The University of Oregon business school has a program on (a center focusing on) sustainable business. There too, that’s the rule, not the exception.

And a Hope for the Future

Maybe it’s still just a pipe dream, an ex-hippy delusion left over from the 1960s, but it seems to me that changes in the business landscape — increasing visibility, for example, in an explosion of small-scale quasi-journalism in blogs and social media — make it steadily more important than long-term successful business has to respect the fundamental values of fairness to employees and customers, sustainability in resources and the environment, and better citizenship in a very broad sense.

The world is revising the golden rule: do unto others as you would have posted and tweeted everywhere, and lodged in Web searches forever. I think that’s a good thing.

Maybe in the future the businesses will actually do well by doing good.

Dreamers and Doers, Babson, Entrepreneurship

Business Education

The New York Times had an interesting piece a few days ago about a live-in entrepreneurship program at Babson college. They called it Dreamers and Doers. Quote:

"‘Any school can teach entrepreneurship,’ he says, ‘but at Babson, we live entrepreneurship.’"

I like Babson. I've been there a couple of times. Good program, and good faculty. And a good reputation for entrepreneurship, especially.

Babson focuses on business, and E-Tower focuses, even more tightly, on entrepreneurship. The residents of E-Tower hash out new business plans at Monday night meetings, and they talk shop throughout the day and night.

“We’re really a dorm of dreamers and doers,” says Prinya Kovitchindachai, who is hoping to market a vile-tasting pill, imported from Thailand, that he touts as a hangover treatment. “College students are the largest group of binge drinkers,” he says, quietly gleeful at the prospect of such a large market so close at hand. Friends have helped him bone up on the basics of international shipping, of securing shelf space and — in a consultation with a neighbor who was wearing a towel and still dripping from the shower — of creating Web sites.

The story goes on to catalog the burst of entrepreneurship programs throughout higher education.

A report issued last year by the Kauffman Foundation, which finances programs to promote innovation on campuses, noted that more than 5,000 entrepreneurship programs are offered on two- and four-year campuses — up from just 250 courses in 1985. Full-scale majors, minors or certificates in entrepreneurship have leaped from 104 in 1975 to more than 500 in 2006. Since 2003, the Kauffman Foundation has given nearly $50 million to 19 colleges and universities to build campus programs.

Studying entrepreneurship is a luxury. If you can manage it, if you can afford it, do it. Do it because you want to, because you're going to enjoy the learning and the people you meet along the way. Don't do it for the money.

The Babson program brings people studying entrepreneurship together, even to the point of living together. Sounds like a good idea — for those who don't have families, and lives, at least.

Are Bizschools Training the Wrong People the Wrong Ways?

Business Education, Reflections

What if we measured the effectiveness of education — any education — by the impact on human lives? What if we said an MBA degree isn't about earning power and recruiting, but thinking power and effectiveness and getting things done; by how many businesses we've started, or grown; by how many new jobs we've created; by how many houses our employees have purchased to live in with loved ones?

What if we measured education by how well we treated our fellow humans in the workplace, on the street, and in the home? Shouldn't that be a relevant scale?

Consider this, a great quote, in a business school context:

"It was our view that you need to think critically about what you are doing every 100 years or so, whether you need to or not."

That's Harvard Business School Dean Jay Light, as quoted — with tongue obviously in cheek — in Harvard Business School Discussed the Future of the MBA, on the HBS site. Yes, he meant to be ironic, and yes, the Harvard Business School is 100 years old this year. And, (third yes in a row), yes, a lot of business school leaders are looking critically at MBA programs. With depressing results.

For their research project, Datar and Garvin interviewed 30 deans and associate deans and roughly 100 students in large and small groups. They wrote case studies on MBA programs at Chicago, INSEAD, Stanford, Yale, and HBS, plus a case on the Center for Creative Leadership (all are available from Harvard Business Publishing); collected data on aggregate trends in MBA enrollments and program designs; and compiled a detailed curriculum analysis of eleven business school programs. To complete the picture, they also interviewed leading academic critics and 28 executives and recruiters. The findings presented a mixed diagnosis of the health of MBA programs, but on balance were, in the words of one HBS faculty member, "depressing."

Depressing, despite the fact that business schools worldwide are producing half a million MBAs every year, 150,000 of them in the United States.

And here's another interesting quote from that same post:

Henry Mintzberg of McGill University in Montreal devoted a book to his contention that "conventional MBA programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences."

It gets worse as you read on, even more depressing, except for the fact that these are a lot of the best schools putting their heads together and trying to figure this out. And that's not depressing, because critical thinking seems like a good step towards improving things. How do you teach business? And how, for that matter, do you measure the value of having been taught?

Here's one thing I know (or at least I'm sure of) about this subject: you don't measure the value of education by income. And you don't measure it by utility to employers.

And I'm still glad, about 30 years later, for my two years in business school. I liked the life we led as a family on campus, I liked the profs, I liked the classes, and those two years worked for me to pass me through the tunnel from journalism to building my own business. I wouldn't have missed it.

And on the other hand, I don't have much evidence that it's good for you, or the next person, or everybody.  It worked for me.

3 Different Views on Jobs for Students

Business Education, Business Mistakes

Pop quiz: What can a college student, an entrepreneurial grad student, a working mother escapee from the cubicle job world, and a 60-year-old business owner have in common on the subject of job seeking at a bad time? Read on.

But first, a story: A senior in college is in a job interview with an investment bank.

"Why do you want to work with us?" the interviewer asks.

"Because you still exist," the job seeker answers.

I heard this story during dinner late last month with a group of Stanford Univeristy seniors. It was a joke. It was followed by laughter; nervous laughter.

One of that group was my daughter, and with my daughter in the midst of this job search worst-ever year, it's been on my mind too. And for this post I'd like to make a three-way combination of people saying (sort of) the same thing.

Let's start the three-way with David Miller, of Campus Entrepreneurship, a grad student, entrepreneur, and a blogger I read regularly. In MBAs: Time to Look in the Entrepreneurial Mirror he writes:

If the state of the economy around the time of graduation is the main determinant of career earnings for those who enter the labor market upon graduation — then DO NOT enter the labor market. BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR. Take control of your own financial trajectory. You won’t show up on the payroll data that Kahn uses when she does her research.

The path may seem more difficult — creating something out of nothing vs. taking a second choice job that pays the bills in the short term, but it will pay off in the long term.

For part two, another blogger I read regularly, Pamela Slim of Escape From Cubicle Nation. I sent her post Stop searching for the perfect job and start finding your life's work from a few weeks ago to my daughter. She said:

Jobs are temporary things, often enticing on paper until you realize that as soon as you get comfortable in your position, it will change, your boss will change, your team will change or your organization will change. That is just the nature of business. Therefore if you go into a job excited by the position or the person you will be working for and not the work itself, you often set yourself up to be disappointed.

Your life's work on the other hand, are activities that you have natural talent for, which energize you and stimulate you and do not change no matter what "job" you happen to be in. I found this for myself when I began to think about my own life's work. I reflected back on all the things I have done in my career and I came to the realization that the core of my life's work is about transformation.

Pam's been through the job mill and looks back on it.

For part three, you have me, the 60-year-old guy. Neither of those two above were writing for seniors in college. They are both right, in the long term, but neither was writing to the college seniors looking for jobs in the midst of financial crisis, massive layoffs, and so on.

Sure, in the long term, the best job is one you make yourself. However, that's not realistic for the 21 or 22-year-old just getting out of college. Many of the best of them will end up building their own new world and their own jobs with it. In the meantime, though, I understand why they want that job. They did well in high school to get into college. Now they want to do well in the next step. And they can't really jump straight out of college into entrepreneurship. Sure there are exceptions to the rule, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and all, but how many exceptions per million?

I don't blame them for worrying.

The best advice I got at a similar time in my life was from Steve Brandt, who was, at that time, teaching at the Stanford University business school.

He said it might not be practical that we the students would try to go straight out of school into starting our own companies. We probably didn't have the track record or the traction.

But what you can do, he added, is to choose which stream you're going to swim in. What you do now in your first few jobs will determine what you can do later.

Reality Check: What Biz School Can’t Teach

Books, Business Education

Many long years ago, during the last weeks of a two-year MBA program, I was in a class that ended up discussing what we had and hadn’t learned. Disappointments came up. I was an outsider, I was happy with having spent two years in class learning things (analysis, technique) that were essentially teachable in class.

What we hadn’t learned, most of my classmates seemed to think, was a lot of the nuts and bolts of getting through the day, week, and year of business; we didn’t have a lot of practical "how-to."

What reminds me of that discussion is paging through an early copy of Guy Kawasaki’s new book, Reality Check. It just arrived over the weekend, and I’ve had time to get to know it.  It’s a book that should be on everybody’s shelves, a reference book in a way, 90-some pieces of real-world experience and wisdom on about as many business-related topics, very well packaged and condensed into easily-readable terms.

It’s a book you’ll browse more than read straight through. You’ll want to refer to it often, later on, as a refresher and thought generator on lots of real-world issues that come up randomly, in business and work life. Not just Guy’s view on the world of start-ups and investing and Silicon Valley, which you’d expect — and is there as well, also well organized and well packaged for the book version of random access — but also things such as when you have to speak in front of a group, or getting along with your boss, dealing with lawyers, hiring people, and even (although the actual topic is not what you think) "the art of sucking up."

Coincidence or not, my copy opened up automatically to page 237, which turns out to be "The Art of Blogging," a list of tips beginning with the following:

"Think "book," not "diary." First, a bit of philosophy: Think of your blog as a product. A good analogy is the difference between a diary and a book. When you write a diary, it contains your spontaneous thoughts and feelings. You have no plans for others to read it. By contrast, if you write a book, from day one you should be thinking about spreading the word about it."

This is a great one to illustrate the content in this very large (more than 450 pages) book. Much of it is familiar to me, because I’m a loyal reader of Guy’s blog. So a lot of his better and better-known blog posts, and a lot of the better stuff in some of his other books, is also in this book. For example, his famous "Top 10 Lies of Venture Capitalists" is included, and several "art of" pieces, and the Zen of Business Plans and Zen of Presentations, how to speak like Steve Jobs. A lot of this book appeared first in the blog. However, getting back to the specific example above, a lot of it hasn’t appeared in his blog. That one — the art of blogging — is not from the blog. It felt new to me, and I checked the blog, and couldn’t find it there.

The point, to make that clear, is that this is not just a compilation of earlier work. A lot of this feels new to me, but seems familiar because of Guy’s very original way of presenting new views on previously existing issues. There is a lot of material taken from posts, but there’s also a lot of new material, and all of it is organized right so you can get at it.

There’s also a nice play between "the art of," as in the art of the start; and "the reality of," which is much more the theme of this new book. The 90 chapters are divided into 12 sections, each themed on reality, as in "The Reality of Competing," and "The Reality of Hiring and Firing," and similarly practical basic themes. You get the reality of working, the reality of planning and executing, and, in the last section, a lot of Guy’s best work, "The Reality of Doing Good."

I strongly recommend this new book. You’ll keep it close, and you’ll refer back to it. It’s not what you learned in the classroom. It’s not what you missed, either. It’s something like what you learn by living it if you have the time and opportunity; plus that Kawasaki vision that adds a nice mix of humor, deflation, and, as in the title of the book, reality check. 

Hey Mom, Why Don’t You Have an MBA?

Business Education

Let’s say you’re in your early to middle 30s. You graduated from college in the middle 1990s. You got into the wild world of Web business close to the beginning. You got caught up in it. You learned, you led, you succeeded. By now you have a good job, and maybe a family, maybe kids.

The Mommy M.B.A. article I saw about this at MSN (with thanks to Steve King on his SmallBusinesLabs blog, who posted on it first) focuses on the mommy segment, which is fine with me, because one of my favorite CEOs fits this demographic exactly. This is a real issue, and a great one for the business schools to address. Author Sue Shellenbarger of careerjournal.com writes:

Because of these issues, female enrollment in full-time M.B.A. programs has remained mired for years at a dismal 30 percent, compared with about 49 percent in medical schools and 47 percent in law schools.

To break this pattern, graduate business schools are fielding new programs to attract women. They’re launching part-time morning M.B.A. programs, bending the rigid M.B.A. track and recruiting students at younger ages.

The new offerings aren’t a good fit for everyone, but the changes are slowly brightening the work-life landscape for aspiring female business leaders.

But let’s go back to talking about you. You never stopped to get the MBA degree. In the beginning, the rush of the Internet boom, who had time? And then came the crash, there were layoffs, you had to scramble. Who had time then? And now? You really like your job, and it took a lot to get where you are. Quit all that to get the MBA?

You know who you are, and I think perhaps I know what you’re thinking. That MBA thing isn’t about money, the way the detractors say it is; it’s about being interested in what you do, wanting to know more, being curious about the theory, getting into things deeper. And it’s annoying, I’m guessing you’d agree, when you get the subtle put-downs from those who did have the time, money, and opportunity to get the degree. Particularly because it feels like they’re frequently overvalued, certainly in their own minds, at least.

And a bit about what worked with me: Looking back, I was lucky with how the MBA worked out in my life. I was 31 when I started, 33 when I finished, but it was a different world in 1979. We were living in Mexico City and wanting to change jobs and countries, having pretty much run through what was interesting in journalism, and not really having to go down, the way you would today, economically down, to quit my job and go back to school. We moved with our three kids from a fifth-floor apartment on the fringes of Mexico City to a small but beautiful townhouse on campus at Stanford University. I did have to work full-time to make the family budget work, but it was all a straight slope up, for my family as well as for me, and I really enjoyed the classes.

In your case, though, you’re probably looking at a starkly different landscape. While for me the MBA looked like a straight upward slope, you’ve done so well that you’re looking at going down, backwards, to do it. Quitting your job for a two-year academic program, costing $50K or so per year, is pretty much out of the question. And those executive MBA programs, attractive as they are, mean a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of work. That’s hardly an attractive prospect. You don’t have two years for that.

And here’s another problem: your knowledge and experience has taken you too far for the classic MBA curriculum. You’ve already done a ton of marketing, product development, business development, and sales. While there are some MBA classes you’d really love to take, most of them start way back at the beginning — your experience has taken you past that — and take too long to get to the real meat. You could really use a concentrated executive MBA.

(Wow, is this starting to sound like a sales pitch? It isn’t. I’m not leading to some supposed solution here. Just so you know.)

I haven’t studied this all that well but I do care about it because I work with several people just like you.

  • I noted with great interest that the Oxford MBA (the Said Business School) takes just a year, not two years; and it’s in Oxford, England, a really great place to live for a year — but it’s also in Pounds Sterling, which makes it very expensive. And it’s a full year, sorry, we know what that does to your job. And after learning about the Oxford program I discovered that there are some one-year MBA programs in the U.S.: Northwestern, Emory, Babson, Cornell, and University of Florida show up there. Plus some other non-U.S. ones. 
  • One of my favorite clients cherry picked the short-term executive education programs offered by brand-name schools. When his biography said "studied business at Harvard," people thought Harvard MBA; but in fact he’d had three or four two-week programs. You’d be amazed at how much marketing background and theory you can pick up in a week or two. Two people very much like you at Palo Alto Software took a one-week product development course at Stanford last June, and they came back ecstatic. A week or two, with a good program, meaning good professors and good co-students, can make an amazing difference.

It’s sad, though, how neither of these solutions really solve the mommy MBA problem that well. The first is an entire year, and the second, although it can quench that thirst you have to know more, doesn’t come with a shiny three-letter degree at the end of the rainbow.   

And another thing: you’d like the classes they offer. You’re interested in this. Sitting in class with a good professor, dealing with business concepts, isn’t some drudge marathon you have to endure; it’s fun to do.

Is it too late? Will this ever work? I don’t know. But I do know that if somebody is going to come up with a solution for you, they’d better do it fast. Maybe better certification for those 2-4 week programs, or perhaps somebody (I mean some institution) able to string together a series of, say, six two-week programs ending in with an executive MBA degree. Is some of that happening out there, and I just don’t know it? 

The Outriders

Advice, Business Education

Do you think this is true: education trains people to do what’s been done before. It’s essentially a system that reinforces conformity and the way things have always been done.

The new ideas and true innovations are more likely to come from the outcasts, weirdos, and loners than from the good students.

Do you think?

Is College Worth it for Entrepreneurs?

Business Education

Last week I got an email from Chris Hearse, of studentbusinesses.com, asking my take on "what students and universities could do to prepare for a world in business."

And then on a breezy refreshing Saturday-after-the holiday in Bend, Oregon, I was browsing Startups at Alltop and came across Is College Worth it For Entrepreneurs? at youngentrepreneur.com.

US News’ Take On Benefits of College

In his "Is College Worth It?" post, Blog Manager Scott Carmichael quotes U.S. News on three ways entrepreneurial-minded students can benefit from college (I can’t find the original source quote, and Scott doesn’t link to it):

1) Study entrepreneurship while developing an outside niche.

Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program at Stanford University, says that while successful company builders have a natural inclination to be entrepreneurs, sometimes it takes education to bring that inclination to full bloom. “There are people who are natural athletes,” Seelig says. “There are people who are natural musicians. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to teach them those skills.”

2) Expose yourself to as many different courses and experiences as possible.

What if you don’t go to a school that lets you study entrepreneurship directly? Seelig says she would advise trying to get as exposed to lots of different disciplines. Having broad knowledge can make it easier to identify opportunities as an entrepreneur. Hello, liberal arts education.

3) Consider even more education.

Depending on your field of interest, going on to graduate school can help a lot. Litan says that the stakes are now higher for tech startups because the world of technology has grown so much more complicated and expansive. “If Bill Gates were asked if when he was 19 years old, could he create Google, he’d probably say no,” says Litan, whose organization recently published a study that looked at founders of tech startups. It found that 31 percent of them had master’s degrees and 10 percent had Ph.D.’s. In addition, the study found that having an M.B.A. meant that a tech entrepreneur on average founded a startup 13 years before others.

My Take On College for Entrepreneurs

I have a different take on it. It’s the wrong question. Education is good for you, long term, for living your life. You should study what you want to study, not what will get you the best job; and if you’re interested in business, then study business.

I hate the idea that we evaluate educational choices based on the income that results.

Separate education from job training. They are different things.

If you like studying business, great; do it. And the best way to study business is to study startups and small business, which is what we call entrepreneurship. That’s my opinion.

But what really helps is any education that helps you learn to think, read, listen, and analyze.

YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog » Is College Worth it for Entrepreneurs?