How to Do Business School Right

Theory #22 | It's worth going, if you know why

There’s an age-old debate about whether you should go to business school or not. It rarely comes up these days but yes, I went to business school — arguably to the most business-school-y of business schools, Harvard Business School.

Business school isn’t “popular” in modern Silicon Valley and the startup world. Yet, more than a few of the “in crowd” have an MBA, and many more have considered getting one. There’s also lots of skepticism about the future of higher education. But that’s all besides the point and for another time.

I want to talk about what you should do if you happen to find yourself there.

The best thing you can do in business school is actually start a business.

(Yep, this is the punchline to the essay. If it’s all you remember from it, I’ll still be happy.)

Starting a business any time is very hard, so this might sound crazy, but it’s not.

If you’ve never started a business before, but you think or even know you want to “some day,” just do it in business school. (If you have started one before, it’s still a great time to take another shot at it.)

There are lots of reasons why it make sense to start a business in business school:

• You have an incredible amount of resources around you (in fact any sizable educational institution does, let alone one that’s focused on business)

• Your professors, peers, alumni all are potential mentors or even customers

• There’s often non-dilutive funding accessible to students with new ventures

• You’re not holding down a job at the same time (for most full-time MBAs)

• You have to keep up with classes but don’t need to chase a certain GPA

There are always objections of course; these are some of the usual ones:

• You need to focus on your classwork and learning

• You need time to build your social and professional network

• Recruiting for post-grad jobs takes up all your “free” time

• It’s hard to do the business justice unless you’re “all in”

• You didn’t need to go to business school to start a business (this one’s sneaky)

My response to these objections: if you can treat it as a key objective, you can usually figure out how to make it work alongside everything else. And the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll find out if it’s something you enjoy, if there’s a future in this path, or if not, what to do next.

Don’t view business school as a pit stop or a break. View it as a limited period of time in which you can take a risk with a lot of resources backing you up.

The other type of objection sounds like this: “I’m not sure I want to be an entrepreneur.” And to that I’d say — you don’t have to commit to being one. But even still, here’s why it can be useful to take a swing at it: