Does an entrepreneur really need an MBA?
Many entrepreneurs use the business school platform to raise capital
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A business school experience teaches you a lot more than finance, entrepreneurship, or how businesses operate. You learn as much, if not more, outside the classroom than inside it. As an entrepreneur who attended business school, I often get asked these questions:
» Did you really need business school? What did you gain?
» Does business school teach you how to be an entrepreneur?
» Was it worth the money because you were pursuing entrepreneurship? How was the return on investment?
» Companies in the Silicon Valley are increasingly hiring people without college degrees, let alone executive education or MBAs? Should I waste my money?
My answer to all these questions always begins with ‘It depends’. Everyone is different. The answer depends on several factors and variables.
- The level of understanding of how a business should be built
- The amount of prior work experience
- The type of business/ product a budding entrepreneur is pursuing
- Whether or not the entrepreneur has a founding team with him/her, in case he needs one, and various other factors.
Most of the top MBA programs in the world have several activities on offer related to academia, entrepreneurship, recruiting, networking, and so on. I classify the choice of activities into four broad baskets here. From my experience, a student can easily spend 100 percent of his/her time on each basket alone. Students must decide how much of their time they want allocate each one of four.
Most classes directly relate to running business or a business function. Whether it’s about raising money, cost accounting, or marketing/ branding. You need to learn all of it as an entrepreneur. At the business school I attended, we had a class called ‘Your First Hundred Days’. It was a real-world simulation of what the first 100 days are like for founding teams.
Most entrepreneurs engage in club activities. A few entrepreneurs find their co-founders or even identify new business opportunities through these leadership groups. They learn from other’s experiences and mistakes. For example, a Russian friend at the entrepreneurship club at INSEAD sold his first company for $7 million at the age of 22. He used most of that money to fund his next company, which went bankrupt by the time he was 25. He then came to business school at the age of 26 to explore new ideas and figure out his next move in life.
Every entrepreneur needs to possess strong interpersonal skills. While socialising outside the classroom, one learns how to deal with people from different countries, cultures, backgrounds. Students build lasting relationships with peers and a network of future leaders that will spread across industries and geographies.
As an entrepreneur, you don’t need to spend any time doing this. However, you can learn from companies that interview your peers. I picked up on a few interview techniques from the larger corporates that came to recruit at my business school, for example, using case studies while hiring senior management.
By engaging in the aforementioned activities, entrepreneurs acquire numerous skillsets and a strong network. However, I have listed four to five areas that most entrepreneurs benefit from by attending a top-tier MBA Program.
Whether business school is necessary to be a successful entrepreneur will continue to be a debated topic. Attending a business school has many advantages, however, the decision will always depend on what stage the business (or idea) is in and the knowledge/ background of the entrepreneur.