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Ask HN: MBA if I want to run a business one day?

26 points by volkk ↗ HN
I have about a decade of experience as an engineer and now about 2 as an EM.

My goal ultimately is to own a business, perhaps start one. I'm not necessarily hyper focused on doing a tech unicorn startup, and am interested in potentially small businesses, maybe boring ones, etc.

I've come to realize I don't know jack when it comes to...finances or business or funding or anything at all.

Is taking a few years to become business savvy worth it? It'd be nice to have a top MBA (if I can get in) on my resume I imagine, but I know that I can probably learn all of this stuff online too. I'm the kind of learner that would really love structure and some kind of curriculum with tests/quizzes to follow.

Does something like this exist outside of trad MBA programs? Should I even look at MBAs? Would love any advice

42 comments

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sn0w_crash
Nobody I know running a business has an MBA. The one or two people I do know with an MBA are reviled by their staff and doing a mediocre job.

Take this as anecdotal feedback but an MBA really isn’t necessary, and can potentially work against you.

you would do well to spend a few months / years working in a small / medium business. The hands on experience is 1000x more valuable than anything you’ll learn in an MBA program.

ckluis
I have an MBA.

My opinion: MBAs teach you how to be middle managers.

But it could still be useful for exposing you in a structured way AND exposing you to potential cofounders.

codegeek
I have a joke that I use all the time. "I don't do MBA. I hire MBAs". If you want to run a business, MBA nas nothing to do with it. Go start a business and while you try to run it, you will learn things that will be your MBA.

Running the business IS the MBA. Nothing else.

MBA degrees are nice to get in consulting or other areas with top employers. Perhaps you will meet a few great people as well if you go to the top ones. But that's it.

If you want to entrepreneur, entrepreneur. Everything else is just feel good stuff.

PS: I run a business for 8+ years with no MBA. I do have a Bachelors in CS but that's it. Not even a Masters in anything.

akulbe
I came here to say this.

I'll add to this… the MBA is not worth the debt you will incur to get the paper.

You can earn multiples of that getting straight to work and skipping the pedigree part. What you learn by doing the work will be more valuable than the theory in class.

You can get a few books that'll cover MBA curriculum, much cheaper.

How am I qualified to speak on this? Business Management undergrad. Can definitely tell you it's not worth the money.

I am successfully self-employed and have earned in the mid 6-figures each year for the last ~7 years.

muzani
You can be successful without one, but I wonder how much more successful you'd be with one. I ran a business for a year, but my flaws were reading financial statements and closing deals with investors, both skills that would be strongly aided by a MBA. A lot of people in the region who were Founding CEO of a unicorn had a MBA.
legitster
If you want to lock yourself in as a middle-manager the rest of your career, an MBA is a good investment. Business schools are good at exposing you to big picture corporate strategy stuff, but not very good at skill building.

If you just want to build a general business knowledge, a great place to get started might be your local community college! Mine had a bunch of retired business owners and experts who taught some really good classes.

Some colleges (business or community) offer programs that exist specifically to jumpstart business owners/founders. You might get all you need from just a handful of classes.

legitster
I think the most valuable classes are going to be finance classes - there are really not a lot of other great places to learn the fine details about how corporate finance/bookkeeping work.

Other than that, the most valuable business classes I took:

- Statistics (should be mandatory for all humans)

- Business law

- Copyright law

- Principles of manufacturing

volkk
that's interesting. seems to be a common theme in these answers, that an MBA = middle management forever. I always looked at them as a potentially good way to understand how to run a business successfully.

aside from just plunging myself into the depths, shouldn't i be somewhat prepared and smart about what it's like to think about company finances? or are people literally just doing and failing and learning on the job? seems very costly?

legitster
Usually people take baby steps.

Getting a business license as a solo practitioner costs $40 in my state.

If you need to hire your first employee, your state likely has some simple instructions on how to do so. And if you can hire an employee, you can also pay for an accountant to help you with payroll, file taxes, etc.

This is how, like, 90% of small businesses in America get started. Your average restaurant owner never went to business school. If you are not incorporated, business finances are pretty understandable.

If you really want to go big to start out, you can look at a service like Stripe Atlas that should walk you through incorporation.

I'm not saying business school is a waste of time. But if you are motivated and already know what you want to do, you can learn all the same things faster and cheaper by just getting started.

HeyLaughingBoy
At least in the US, the cost to start a business is chickenfeed. If you do business under your own name, e.g., as an artist or a consultant you can probably start today at no charge. The IRS only cares that you fill out a Schedule C at tax time. If you want to have a business name, it can cost a bit more, but typically less than $100. Change your legal structure? In my state it cost me, IIRC, about $150 to file the paperwork for an LLC and my accountant charges an extra $100/year to do my taxes.

The IRS has a lot of online information on starting a business, but it's buried in multiple documents. The best overall guide I know of is Publication 334: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p334

I think it's a matter of personality. Some people want everything analyzed before they start, but I'm not much of a planner. I just jump in and see how the water feels.

SashaRuvin
I don't agree with the statement about locking yourself in as a middle manager. Take a look at the top executives at major companies. You absolutely will see tons of MBAs.
mgh2
About 50%. In tech it is less, most were engineers
GekkePrutser
On the other hand: how many % of MBA graduates are C-level execs?

I think that kind of role requires a lot more than that paper, the MBA isn't really a discerning factor.

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mathattack
It helps to know accounting and economics. If you can learn them without going to business school, you don’t need the MBA or debt that goes with it. Unless you get into Harvard or Stanford - the connections to funding justify the expense.
sgt
In the same way you don't need a DBA to run a database, you don't need an MBA to run a business.
beckingz
But sometimes, a good DBA or MBA makes your business a whole lot better.
binarynate
For context, I turned a side project into a business (https://vuplex.com) that I've been working on full time for over 3 years. Here's my advice:

- Listen to the Indie Hackers Podcast. I learned an enormous amount from it, and it gave me a crash course in business. The podcast shifted to a new format a few months ago, so I recommend starting with the first episode and working your way forward:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/indie-hackers/id120616...

- After you've listened to the Indie Hackers podcast a bit, learn by doing! If you're a software engineer, you can use the principles discussed in the Indie Hackers podcast to create products and sell them on the internet.

linksnapzz
My understanding is that having an MBA is useful for getting certain lenders to take you seriously as a businessman, for the purpose of getting loans.
baremetal
if you think you need to invest years of time and money to learn to become business savvy then perhaps you are too fearful to be effective as an entrepreneur.

id learning account and economics though as someone else said. i took them at uni as elective courses. but local community colleges usually have them as well.

volkk
i'm not fearful per se, i like to be prepared and am doing some due diligence before blindly doing something. there's a lot of time waste that goes into anything early on, and you always look back and say "man if i only i had advice i could have not wasted years" and that's my reasoning here
baremetal
just make sure you have a large cash buffer for both your own personal expenses and the businesses expenses.

start small, control costs as much as possible. that way the mistakes you make arent too costly and you give yourself some time to learn the ins and outs.

as a serial entrepreneur the advice i wish i had, was to start earlier. also try to find advisors and mentors.

volkk
> as a serial entrepreneur the advice i wish i had, was to start earlier

thank you, i hear that often and i'm trying to really internalize that.

> also try to find advisors and mentors.

would you be willing to give me some advice as to where to look for some of these kinds of people?

lazyeye
Suggest you ask on Reddit too

/r/fatfire

srvmshr
It could be just me: But I see MBA as a means of acquiring networking with go-to folks if that part of your professional career didn't pan out with a Bachelor's (+Masters optionally). With social media, Y-combinator, startup culture - MBAs are going out of fad for tech ecosystem. They exist - but not exactly the superstars they used to be a decade back. Tech companies identify tech superstars in the present trend. People who build their things are directly managing businesses. Many tech CEOs now are PhDs instead of Management crop. Watch out for these signs. People who build their products and services usually invest building their karma around it. That commitment is rare to see from someone who is trained to manage others invrsting their souls into their love. Plus, management degrees cost a pretty penny.

MBA teaches you a lot of soft skills: I feel the important part being how to do better cost performance, choose the right communication, manage your employees & so on. That you already probably did to an extent as EM.

vivegi
If you have the opportunity in your current job to take on a P&L responsibility that includes being a manager of people (I see you are an EM), you can pick up quite a lot of the day-to-day running of a business. Even a couple of years of experience would make you a well-rounded manager and expose you to different aspects of the business.

The "boring" parts of running a business: contracts, legal, hiring, marketing, sales, finance etc., is where you need exposure.

PS: I started as a programmer, after 10+ years as an engineer I moved over to business operations, rose to become Chief Operating Officer and managed a $100m/yr P&L and then quit to start my own co. I didn't do an MBA.

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clean_send
I think the under represented view point of the the MBA is you're only as good as your peers and the school's connections. Top Tier MBA programs, provide inside tracks to companies in a way I have never seen. Ex. When I was interviewing at McKinsey, I had to do a number of additional interviews because I only had an undergrad. Meanwhile a friend from Northwestern's Kellogg was offered a position after ONE interview.

The math I've done when considering an MBA is a top tier program is expensive, competitive and I can't work during that time. The value besides connections is a the potential pivot into a field that I otherwise wouldn't have as accelerated of a path into. As many have said, if you're interested in business as a basic level, try starting a business you will learn. If you want to go be an executive at a mid to large scale company, consider and MBA from a top tier school.

gardenfelder
John Seely-Brown famously opened a youtube with "I would rather hire a high level World of Warcraft player than an MBA from Harvard". The quote gives good google.
volkk
that's hilarious!
jrm4
Probably a waste of time. Drill down on talking to as many people as you can about your thing. I hate the phrase "network," but yeah, expose your surface area to things you're looking into.
antipaul
Perhaps get into someone else's early growth business and learn from their mistakes, I mean help them grow, and then take those lessons to your own next thing
QuadmasterXLII
MBAs are for increasing the amount of money you take in at the expense of the total value of the organization you're in. Great for fucking some gravid big box retailer or govt agency that wants advice, less useful for leading an organization when your success is tied to the organization's success.
Archit3ch
Skip the MBA.

If you want to run a business, start a business. Make sure you have a day job or a network to support you. You will figure out everything else along the way.

If you want to spend a year studying, get into a good (not necessarily top) Machine Learning MSc. It's hard to get in. It's hard to finish. It may or may not help you achieve your goals.

volkk
can you explain why ML? i don't want to study for the sake of studying if that's what you meant by that
bgilly
Experience trumps school, especially for running a business. Start as small of a business as you can, so you can gain experience. You’ll learn more about the real world than any school can teach you.
steven_noble
Depends massively on (1) the size and type of business and (2) your current skill gaps. I did an MBA and it helped a lot with well paid business consulting until I decided that was a highway to hell. But most of the relevant skills I think you can best learn on the job, hopefully before the stakes get too great.
simne
You don't need MBA to run business.

The best you could do to avoid failure, to find nearest business club and make agreement with somebody, who will mentor-ship you. - This is best way for novice to learn running business, because good mentor himself experienced businessman.

After that, you could attend some academy level courses, if you will see very exact question for them. - In real life, academy knowledge mostly slows down business, not help it.