startups, mba’s, and buckets
There’s been an interesting conversation happening in the world of blogs I read over the last week or so about the role and value of MBAs in startups. It started with this post by Charlie O’Donnell. This post was tweeted around the HBS community with some fervor last weekend and I read it and this reply by Rob Go shortly before embarking on an errand expedition (and ultimately a debate about these posts) with Rafael Corrales last Sunday night. Rafael wrote a great response to them, which I mostly agree with, and Kyle Doherty then added his two cents here.
I really have no desire to engage in a debate about MBAs’ approach to recruiting here (at startups or elsewhere) because I think most of the issues have been covered by Rob and Rafael and Charlie (particularly in the comments on Rafael’s post). I do, however, want to say one thing. And I should caveat that this is general commentary inspired by the above conversation and my experiences over the past year and a half, not a response directed at Rob, Charlie, or anyone else.
It frustrates me to no end when people bucket MBAs. An MBA is not a race or a religion. It is a graduate degree. That’s it. There is almost nothing I can generalize about any of the people I’ve ever met in this MBA program (or from any other MBA program for that matter) except to say that they either have or have had an interest in studying business administration.
People who make the assumption that MBAs are X, Y, or Z, simply because they have an MBA are as guilty of lunacy as the MBAs who throw themselves at startups with the expectations of red-carpet-rollouts simply because they have an MBA.
Contrary to popular belief, not all MBAs are flocking to finance and/or consulting. Further, not all MBAs *come* from finance or consulting. There are a ton of people here who come from interesting operational and functional backgrounds and have every intention of returning to operational and functional positions. These are the same types of positions that any startup seeks to fill.
So, what’s my point?
When Kyle said:
While it seems unfair to bucket a whole group based on the actions of a few, it’s human nature to do so.  Those who are really dedicated will figure it out, the perception doesn’t matter.  So I guess my approach is to think: who cares?
My answer to this?
I do.
I care a lot. I don’t want a few people who lack a social compass representing me in the world. I don’t want anybody to assume anything about me when they see MBA on my resume except for that at one point in my life I had an interest in studying business administration. And I want to fight those generalizations that get made (and the people who cause them to be made) for the sake of the rest of us who don’t behave like this. Then maybe the people who use criticism of MBAs and B-schools as a way to sell newspapers and display ads will have to find another way to write about us.
updating the site
I’ve added the WPtouch theme for mobile devices which means if you’re looking at this site on an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android device, you’ll have a mobile-optimized experience (it looks entirely different, but is much more consumable). Enjoy.
community supported agriculture
This is an off-topic post for me, but I felt compelled to write a quick blurb about the dinner I attended last night. It was a supper-club style event thrown by a friend in support of the Waltham Fields Community Farm. The primary purpose was to raise awareness (and money) for Community Supported Agriculture. This is a particularly important issue here in Massachusetts, which I knew little/nothing about. More information on the CSA initiative at Waltham Fields here, and more information about the Homegrown Supperclub (an awesome idea – bringing incredible local/sustainable food to the table) here.
i’m back
Well, after deliberately taking last semester off from blogging, I’m back. Lots to say and looking forward to doing so. In the meantime, I’ve made a few tweaks to the design here – just goofing around with new toys. More to come…
project red balloon
I’m writing to share an initiative I’ve been working on at school and ask for your help.
DARPA, the government agency, is sponsoring a challenge on Saturday to test the ability of social networks to mobilize toward a common task. They are placing ten giant red weather balloons (tethered near the ground) around the US for 8 hours on Saturday. The first person/team to correctly submit the locations of the ten balloons wins $40,000.
We will be donating the money to The Global Fund’s AIDS research/awareness initiative.
I’m working on this initiative with several classmates and a few profs from Harvard Business School, and we’re looking at this as a test of the HBS network. Hopefully we win, but I’m confident we’ll learn something in the process!
details: www.projectredballoon.com
twitter: www.twitter.com/helpredballoon
Please help us spread the word by forwarding to your friends, blogging, retweeting, facebooking, etc.
We need your SUPPORT and it’s for a GREAT CAUSE!
on culture
feed issues
I realized my feed was down tonight. A bunch of troubleshooting led me to disqus as the problem. So I killed it. In the process, though, I deleted my feedburner feed. It will redirect for 30 days, at which point I’ll redirect it again. None of this should matter to you (hopefully), because my readers are all seeing the blog fine now, but if you lose me from your reader at some point, come back and resubscribe.
peoplespace
As I was packing up to leave school in late May, I had a weird experience on campus. I had crossed the river from home to school to pick a few things up from my various lockers, closets, etc. It was about 10 days after school had let out for summer. Most people had already left campus for travel before starting summer internships.
Being on campus, a place where I had had a million intense memories accumulate during the year, I had a rather vacant feeling. The type of vacancy you’d encounter coming to a place you’d never been before.
In my mind I started to feel nostalgic – remembering all the great things that had happened that year.
It occurred to me then that the place would never be the same. Granted, I still have a whole year to go at HBS, and many many more memories yet to create. But the notion that what had happened during the year – the experience – was more closely tied to the people and the circumstance than the physical place, made me realize how much I will need to capture every opportunity in the coming year.
Because once the moment passes: the people, the place, the circumstance – everything that happened there becomes a nice (but unrepeatable) memory.
I wonder what psychologists would say about memories – and the strength of them – relative to people or place.
the content wedge
In corporate strategy, theorists like to talk about the “wedge,” or the gap between cost of goods and a customer’s willingness to pay. This means that the company with the most sustainable strategy has the lowest cost of goods and the customers with the highest willingness to pay. (That’s a simplification, but bear with me).
The same could be said of content, if it weren’t for a complicating factor called quality. Whereas other industries have found ways to reduce the cost of goods without reducing the quality, content quality is still tied very closely to cost. (If you give a film student a prosumer camera and a modest budget, the discerning audience will still be able to target the work as sub-par when screened alongside a professionally produced film involving 35mm film cameras, etc.)
Recently, though, things have started to change. Technological advances have enabled the creation of high-quality content that rivals that of Hollywood. The question then remains, how long before a new system, a new content producing apparatus, springs forward to break the old-standing business model?
You can see some of this type of work happening around the web already. My friend Nathan Heleine of Crush + Lovely has been involved with this project called Fifty People, One Question. The videos are pretty astounding both from an editorial perspective and from a physical quality perspective. The photography is done by Benjamin Reece of The Deltree and it is just astounding (more of his stuff on his site). Worth checking out any of the links if you have time.
Projects like this are the future of moving image content.
illustrated blogging
Felt compelled to share a link I stumbled across today. Maira Kalman “blogs” for the New York Times. The blog is called “And the Pursuit of Happiness.” She is an artist, illustrator and designer, and this is reflected in her work at the Times. Her thoughts and observations are presented in illustrated fashion. (It’s also interesting to note that the Times has an alternative style sheet for the presentation of this blog.) I found the most recent post, entitled “Can Do” particularly inspirational. Enjoy.
