03 4 / 2013
Why Dave McClure is wrong about MBAs in startups (sorta)
There have been a number of brew-hahas about whether getting an MBA is helpful in starting a company. Here, here, and here.
While these posts make good arguments, I can’t help thinking that everyone has totally missed the point of getting an MBA in the first place.
An MBA was never supposed to help you turn cute birds into a hit game. No one said it was going to help you increase sheep-throwing in your social network. It wasn’t going to help you get a $1B acquisition for a photo-sharing app. The traditional MBA that made so many old-school software entrepreneurs successful didn’t teach any of this. It taught you how to sell.
Sales. Not product management. Not product development. Not UX. Sales. This is what a good MBA program should teach you. It should teach you how to cold-email. How to cold-call. How to choke back on a sale in order to increase the likelihood of it going through.
It is true that you can learn skills on your own without school. We see this in computer science – there are successful hacker-entrepreneurs who didn’t need a computer science degree. Similarly, there are natural-born hustlers who will never need formal schooling to be a good salesperson. But for the remaining 99% of successful hacker-entrepreneurs who are not Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, an engineering degree is helpful (sometimes :) ). And, likewise, formal sales-schooling can be helpful for many people who are not naturally good at sales (such as myself).
Moreover, contrary to popular belief, sales isn’t just hustle. Brute force will drive more sales, but they aren’t necessarily optimize sales. There is a science to sales. Good sales schools will teach you these best practices. Since we’re a big fan of split testing at LaunchBit, we’ve sometimes held cold-email competitions within our company. My co-founder Jennifer will write a cold-email template for me to send. And, we’ll pit that against one that I’ll write based on the best practices I learned in my sales courses at MIT Sloan. My pitch has yet to lose. It’s not because I’m a naturally gifted with words. It’s because there really are best practices to selling.
Sales education isn’t taught at startup incubators (though I think they should teach this – hint hint, Dave). So, incubators are NOT the new MBA. But that said, sadly, many MBA programs are canceling their own sales programs and shooting themselves in the foot. I believe at my own alma mater, there are now fewer sales courses than when I was in school just 6 years ago. And, MBAs who do have the opportunity to take these sales courses no longer do. Sadly, it’s just not what people want to learn. In the startup world, entrepreneurs magically think software sells itself. At Google, the ad sales org is physically situated away from the rest of the company. So many former colleagues of mine don’t even realize what feeds them at night. Hint: it’s not Google Plus… It’s sad – all-around, we’ve lost sight of how important sales-education is.
So here we are, in an era where software is eating the world, and there are more Saas companies than ever. Unless you’re the rare company like Atlassian who doesn’t need salespeople (frankly, I find that hard to believe – why do they have salespeople listed in Linkedin?), most of these Saas companies will need sales to at least get off the ground if not thrive. I think most hustlers could really benefit from a sales education. Traditionally, the MBA has been a great way to learn sales, but these days, I’m not sure this is the case. There certainly is a need here to make hustler-entrepreneurs more successful, and EVERYONE appears to be missing the boat on it by focusing solely on product development, product management, UX/UI, and design.
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