Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Healy Jones on an MBA & Startups

My buddy Healy Jones writes a great blog post on why MBA's can be so useful in startups. Here is a snippet:

"As OfficeDrop has grown I’ve found my MBA more and more useful. Basic stuff like statistics, pricing strategies, etc are particularly useful. I sure that I could have learned this in a book, but there is something about the classroom learning environment that is good for the way I acquire knowledge.
The connections I made during the MBA are very useful. For example, I wanted to test out an idea for a new verticalized product offering at OfficeDrop. I glanced through LinkedIn, saw several classmates who were in the targeted field and had some quick conversations. I could have done this without the MBA, but it was nice to know that there were people who would pick up the phone. And of course the connections were helpful during our fund raise."

Also, he has a great point about how student loan availability make tuition increases easy for schools, but they end up crowding out risk appetite of recent grads because of the huge debt burden.

"*On a somewhat unrelated note, does anyone else think that student loan situation in the US is the major cause of the educational cost inflation that we have here? In other words, because the federal government makes loans so easily available it is driving up the cost of higher education? I’m starting to think that government policies may be part of the reason that education is becoming so expensive - flood a market with cheap financing and the asset prices will go up??"