(btw, if you understand the cover photo reference, email me or dm me on twitter immediately bc I insist we be best friends)
Should you get an MBA, especially if you’re interested in tech, startups, or starting your own company?
I’m not sure what’s right for you, but I wrote the below 10 pages based on my time at Stanford GSB to hopefully help you figure it out. 😘 Here’s my honest assessment of what MBA programs are good for, what kinds of people benefit most, if the cost/experience is worth it, etc.
I’m Steph (Mui), and I’m the founder of PIN (which I only would’ve started because of my time getting my MBA!). I’m also a (proud and grateful) Stanford GSB grad.
This is probably the most frequent question I get cold DM’d (after “should I be a VC?” and “can you please, PLEASE stop posting on Twitter?” – quick answers: maybe and no).
Despite my gratitude for the experience, I also have lots of honest critiques, and I decided to share this doc publicly because there aren’t enough honest testimonials of MBAs. If you search for articles about getting an MBA, you’ll get results that are wildly positive or negative and with little to no nuance about the tradeoffs for individuals with different backgrounds/goals. Similarly, if you ask people whether you should get an MBA or not, I think you’ll generally find major confirmation bias – aka once you’ve decided to get or not get an MBA, people tend to believe their choice was the best and they double down on telling others why they should make the same decision. I think these tweets (that I happened to see in the last day!) sum up the two opposite opinions you’ll get.
I don’t think a $200K/2 year investment is that simple to recommend, even if I loved (most of) mine. I also say this as someone who talked to 50+ people about this decision of whether to go or not (I don’t recommend it), and wish something like this existed.
People typically get MBAs for the following reasons: