6 ms·

> They spent too much time on the product and not enough time on growth and distribution. The first pitch deck they put together for investors was mediocre. The

> They spent too much time on the product and not enough time on growth and distribution. The first pitch deck they put together for investors was mediocre. They began marketing too late. They failed to effectively position themselves against giants like Apple and Google, who offer fairly robust — and mostly free — Everpix alternatives. People on HN crap all over MBAs, but these are the types of problems many of them have been trained to solve.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- brandnewlow 13y ago
  Either way, they need to hire an annoying "business guy" to worry about money 24/7 at some stage during the 18 months.
- kohanz 13y ago
  I do not hold an MBA, but have a few friends that do and this seems like an inaccurate generalization. My understanding is that MBA's can have varied focus areas, with a varying curriculum. For example, MBA's can be focused on: Finance, Marketing, Management, etc, and yes, Entrepreneurship.
  - dm8 13y ago
    How can you have formal education in Entrepreneurship? It's pretty much on job type of learning. Not trying to be snarky but I'm genuinely curious.
    - ojbyrne 13y ago
      Like any field, there are people who do research on it. Being familiar with the research that can be useful. Just replace the word "Entrepreneurship" with "Sales" (which is similar) and perhaps you can understand.
    - arbitrage 13y ago
      90% of small businesses fail within the first year, or so the conventional wisdom goes. Not all of them can possibly fail for completely unique reasons.
      - kansface 13y ago
        Sure, but lack of hustle/perseverance is probably the biggest factor past the trivially solvable problems.
        acjohnson55 13y ago
        Product-market fit? Team's ability to execute? Resource constraints?
    - kohanz 13y ago
      Eric Ries, for example, might differ that you can't formalize learning about startups. Almost every job has quite a bit "on the job" learning that you won't get in your academic studies. An MBA still teaches a lot of the skills, whether they be in finance, business planning, networking, IP issues, or presenting, that are useful for entrepreneurs. I imagine an MBA focused specifically on entrepreneurship would have even more useful stuff in the curriculum. Would be great if someone with such a qualification could chime in. A friend of mine with an MBA had one course where the main project was to basically to development a business from scratch and pitch it to real investors. Several students went on to launch those businesses after school.
    - ngoel36 13y ago
      The same way you can have formal education in Computer Science...but never mind, you're right, no on-the-job learning in CS...
    - EricDeb 13y ago
      I have an MBA and MS in CS from Arizona (who at the time was ranked top 10 in entrepreneurship). I did not have a focus in the MBA so I could do Computer Science but the entrepreneurship track sounded like a less serious/competitive YC with a few classes thrown in the mix. You grouped up with others and worked on an idea for a year. The program recruited successful retires to both teach the classes and advise you on your idea. It actually sounded fairly practical, and the caliber of advisors they recruited was pretty good (most of them had run several businesses and made a few million dollars over their lifetime). It was definitely less tech-oriented though.
    - rscale 13y ago
      An MBA in entrepreneurship has business classes adapted for an entrepreneurial audience. A typical MBA involves the study of topics such as marketing, finance, risk management, accounting, economics, statistics, operations, HR, organizational dynamics, business law, and strategy. Many of these can easily be adapted to be more useful for entrepreneurs. A finance class can focus on venture capital more than the bond market. A marketing class can focus on new product development more than the promotion of existing products. A law class can deal with the issues most relevant to startups. The accounting needs of a startup exec are different than those a future partner at Deloitte. etc. As a clear example of the type of content that an entrepreneurial class could cover, Steve Blank's book Four Steps to the Epiphany originated not as a book, but as the notes for his class at Haas.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
- martingordon 13y ago
  Part of the problem is that an MBA can be a lot of different things even within a schools. I, for one, am working on learning how to solve problems that startups face, problems that can't be solved by code. I'm not saying that hiring an MBA would have been a magic fix for Everpix, but when looking at the business as a whole, the product looked great (despite its lack of support for non-JPEG formats, but that's more of a personal nitpick) and there was engineering talent to continue building the product. However, the part of the article I quoted above indicates that the team lacked the business talent to successfully find a market for the product (or to identify that there wasn't a market and pivot while they still had cash left).
  - dm8 13y ago
    Is working at a startup mandatory as part of curriculum then? Also, every startup has tons of different problems at micro level even though macro themes are consistent (e.g. getting new customers etc.). It will be hard to generalize problem solving across startups. I agree that Everpix couldn't find scalable business model for their product. But what I'm saying is you may not necessarily need MBA to find market/business model.
    - untog 13y ago
      Also, every startup has tons of different problems at micro level even though macro themes are consistent (e.g. getting new customers etc.). It will be hard to generalize problem solving across startups. I don't see why. Startups aren't some magical beast unmatched anywhere else in the world. They're small businesses.
enjo 13y ago
The anti-education bias of HN simply fascinates me.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  It's strictly from a code monkey perspective. If you want to be a coder, you really don't need to go to school. If you want to take it to the next level and learn the theory behind what you are doing, get a degree. I dropped out, or semi-dropped out because I wanted to be a frontend/UI guy and learning shit like C++ and basic C/PERL/PHP <3 (seriously) for two years, while paying 10k/year, was super pointless. I'm saving now for a proper degree, and the rent to go along with it. Probably going to do electrical or computer engineering, because that, you can't really learn online like you can HTML/CSS/JS.
  - cookiecaper 13y ago
    A "proper degree" is ridiculously inefficient. If you've already established a feasible career path, there is little reason to learn these things by following the standard curricular programs available at most educational institutions. Find good online communities and resources, buy textbooks and other primary informational sources, and hire a good private tutor to help fill in the blanks or answer questions and you can get the same stuff down much better in a fraction of the time it'd take with generalized mass schooling, i.e., universities. University is an outdated model that's never really been applicable to the "real work" that needs to occur in an economy. Not sure why everyone decided it needed to become a general thing after WWII.
    - enjo 13y ago
      Only if you view a degree as skills training. The idea that it is inefficient is what I find so interesting, because from my point of view it's entirely the opposite. For most people a degree will greatly improve their ability to learn new things. It will expose them to a whole host of thoughts, ideas, and areas of exploration that they would otherwise never touch. The thing is, I don't have a degree. I have a LOT of one (well two actually). I feel that it's ok, because the last 30 hours or so that I'm missing are basically all computer science. That's the stuff I've been able to learn. Still I can't imagine not having the college education that I do have. I use what I learned in psychology almost every day (absolutely essential for anyone trying to run a company). I use the lessons learned in history and literature to guide my decision making. Philosophy has greatly influenced HOW I interact with others and informs the type of team that I want to have. College made me a much better entrepreneur and it did it only four years! Give me that experience every day over someone who skipped college. Now, can you get all of that elsewhere? Of course. You can learn to program. That's easy. You can read every day. Of course. But unless you are a remarkable human being (and they do exist), you'll never achieve the breadth of knowledge that comes with a degree. Hell I'm all for restructuring how we think about education. The answer isn't to eliminate it. Instead lets decouple the skills training aspect. Liberal arts degrees for everyone!
rhizome 13y ago
To be fair, the slogan their late-term marketing consultant came up with was pretty lame.
- drp4929 13y ago
  Your response seems to assume that she has earned MBA, but she has not. http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliesupan http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliesupan
- joelandren 13y ago
  To be fair, there's a lot more to user acquisition than a slogan.
weixiyen 13y ago
You don't need an MBA to solve those problems. It's a problem with prioritization, not lack of ability.
- EricDeb 13y ago
  That's exactly what an MBA does. Teaches you to prioritize effectively. It also gives you countless examples of businesses who don't, and the consequences they suffer. Sometimes learning these lessons in the real world can be very costly.
  - NirDremer 13y ago
    MBA is great but I think your expectations are high. Oftentimes the issue is not knowledge but rather working at high pressure and to do it well nothing beats experience & good mentors.
  - ringdabell 13y ago
    One of the biggest myth about getting an MBA is that you learn anything at all. The two primary motivations for getting an MBA are completely unrelated to obtaining an "education": 1. Career transformation (i.e. you're a marketer that wants to go into banking.. basically impossible to get interviews without going to bschool) 2. Obtain a professional network "Learning" is really a tertiary priority.
cookiecaper 13y ago
Does an MBA inoculate someone from making these judgment errors? If so, I personally know multiple MBA-holders who've made similar errors who should be informed that they deserve their money back or something. It's important to be aware of the necessity to perform those business functions that coders probably would rather not bother with, but once that happens, I find that technical people tend to make much, much better judgment calls than their business school superiors. In reality, it's rare to find people who're daring enough to apply simple rationality across most or all spectra, regardless of their background. Unfortunately, an MBA seemingly does very little to mitigate this, and it's the core problem. Yes, people could hypothetically learn, but most don't. I don't understand why we've all fooled ourselves into believing that four years of rote memorization and arbitrary compliance will do anything. I guess it being a much more fundamental problem is scary, because as simple as it may be, it's apparently quite difficult for most people to change. We have a big problem with our educational and hiring cultures.
- ryanhuff 13y ago
  Does an MBA inoculate someone from making these judgment errors? If so, I personally know multiple MBA-holders who've made similar errors who should be informed that they deserve their money back or something. An MBA inoculates somebody from making poor decisions just as much as anybody having expertise in any specific field. As you would agree, nobody is beyond making a poor decision. Let's also be clear than an MBA is a broadly defined credential, as there are a host of specializations (including Human Resources management, Marketing, Finance, etc) that are often bundled within the "degree". However, from what was described in the Everpix case, I am confident that somebody with the right mix of educational training in early-stage venture management (MBA w/entrepreneurship concentration) and smarts could have added value.
megablast 13y ago
I am going to tackle this, from a coders point of view, you can very quickly see if someone is any good. Or a designer, sysad, most other things. But MBA are like economists, they all have different ideas on how to advance, and it is very hard to actually hard to test them, takes a long time to see if they were actually correct, if they fail they have a good reason, and it all sounds like something you could have worked out anyway.
argonaut 13y ago
Let's be clear: learning about those lessons will take maybe, at most, a month or two of reading a couple of books, reading PG's essays, and reading a few of the blogs written by great entrepreneurs and VCs. That's it. An MBA probably does teach you this - it just doesn't need to take two years and XYZ thousand dollars. There's a lot of fluff in an MBA that's just not necessary for a startup. The fact also remains that the vast majority of people I know who got an MBA did it for the network, not for the education.
lazyjones 13y ago
> People on HN crap all over MBAs, but these are the types of problems many of them have been trained to solve. So, didn't their investor have any MBAs? These are also the kinds of problems VC investors are supposed to advise on, to protect, you know, their investment.
mathattack 13y ago
Is this an issue of needing an MBA, or just needing to think about marketing and finance?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

brandnewlow 13y ago
Either way, they need to hire an annoying "business guy" to worry about money 24/7 at some stage during the 18 months.
kohanz 13y ago
I do not hold an MBA, but have a few friends that do and this seems like an inaccurate generalization. My understanding is that MBA's can have varied focus areas, with a varying curriculum. For example, MBA's can be focused on: Finance, Marketing, Management, etc, and yes, Entrepreneurship.
- dm8 13y ago
  How can you have formal education in Entrepreneurship? It's pretty much on job type of learning. Not trying to be snarky but I'm genuinely curious.
  - ojbyrne 13y ago
    Like any field, there are people who do research on it. Being familiar with the research that can be useful. Just replace the word "Entrepreneurship" with "Sales" (which is similar) and perhaps you can understand.
  - arbitrage 13y ago
    90% of small businesses fail within the first year, or so the conventional wisdom goes. Not all of them can possibly fail for completely unique reasons.
    - kansface 13y ago
      Sure, but lack of hustle/perseverance is probably the biggest factor past the trivially solvable problems.
      - acjohnson55 13y ago
        Product-market fit? Team's ability to execute? Resource constraints?
  - kohanz 13y ago
    Eric Ries, for example, might differ that you can't formalize learning about startups. Almost every job has quite a bit "on the job" learning that you won't get in your academic studies. An MBA still teaches a lot of the skills, whether they be in finance, business planning, networking, IP issues, or presenting, that are useful for entrepreneurs. I imagine an MBA focused specifically on entrepreneurship would have even more useful stuff in the curriculum. Would be great if someone with such a qualification could chime in. A friend of mine with an MBA had one course where the main project was to basically to development a business from scratch and pitch it to real investors. Several students went on to launch those businesses after school.
  - ngoel36 13y ago
    The same way you can have formal education in Computer Science...but never mind, you're right, no on-the-job learning in CS...
  - EricDeb 13y ago
    I have an MBA and MS in CS from Arizona (who at the time was ranked top 10 in entrepreneurship). I did not have a focus in the MBA so I could do Computer Science but the entrepreneurship track sounded like a less serious/competitive YC with a few classes thrown in the mix. You grouped up with others and worked on an idea for a year. The program recruited successful retires to both teach the classes and advise you on your idea. It actually sounded fairly practical, and the caliber of advisors they recruited was pretty good (most of them had run several businesses and made a few million dollars over their lifetime). It was definitely less tech-oriented though.
  - rscale 13y ago
    An MBA in entrepreneurship has business classes adapted for an entrepreneurial audience. A typical MBA involves the study of topics such as marketing, finance, risk management, accounting, economics, statistics, operations, HR, organizational dynamics, business law, and strategy. Many of these can easily be adapted to be more useful for entrepreneurs. A finance class can focus on venture capital more than the bond market. A marketing class can focus on new product development more than the promotion of existing products. A law class can deal with the issues most relevant to startups. The accounting needs of a startup exec are different than those a future partner at Deloitte. etc. As a clear example of the type of content that an entrepreneurial class could cover, Steve Blank's book Four Steps to the Epiphany originated not as a book, but as the notes for his class at Haas.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
martingordon 13y ago
Part of the problem is that an MBA can be a lot of different things even within a schools. I, for one, am working on learning how to solve problems that startups face, problems that can't be solved by code. I'm not saying that hiring an MBA would have been a magic fix for Everpix, but when looking at the business as a whole, the product looked great (despite its lack of support for non-JPEG formats, but that's more of a personal nitpick) and there was engineering talent to continue building the product. However, the part of the article I quoted above indicates that the team lacked the business talent to successfully find a market for the product (or to identify that there wasn't a market and pivot while they still had cash left).
- dm8 13y ago
  Is working at a startup mandatory as part of curriculum then? Also, every startup has tons of different problems at micro level even though macro themes are consistent (e.g. getting new customers etc.). It will be hard to generalize problem solving across startups. I agree that Everpix couldn't find scalable business model for their product. But what I'm saying is you may not necessarily need MBA to find market/business model.
  - untog 13y ago
    Also, every startup has tons of different problems at micro level even though macro themes are consistent (e.g. getting new customers etc.). It will be hard to generalize problem solving across startups. I don't see why. Startups aren't some magical beast unmatched anywhere else in the world. They're small businesses.

enjo 13y ago

The anti-education bias of HN simply fascinates me.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rfnslyr 13y ago
It's strictly from a code monkey perspective. If you want to be a coder, you really don't need to go to school. If you want to take it to the next level and learn the theory behind what you are doing, get a degree. I dropped out, or semi-dropped out because I wanted to be a frontend/UI guy and learning shit like C++ and basic C/PERL/PHP <3 (seriously) for two years, while paying 10k/year, was super pointless. I'm saving now for a proper degree, and the rent to go along with it. Probably going to do electrical or computer engineering, because that, you can't really learn online like you can HTML/CSS/JS.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  A "proper degree" is ridiculously inefficient. If you've already established a feasible career path, there is little reason to learn these things by following the standard curricular programs available at most educational institutions. Find good online communities and resources, buy textbooks and other primary informational sources, and hire a good private tutor to help fill in the blanks or answer questions and you can get the same stuff down much better in a fraction of the time it'd take with generalized mass schooling, i.e., universities. University is an outdated model that's never really been applicable to the "real work" that needs to occur in an economy. Not sure why everyone decided it needed to become a general thing after WWII.
  - enjo 13y ago
    Only if you view a degree as skills training. The idea that it is inefficient is what I find so interesting, because from my point of view it's entirely the opposite. For most people a degree will greatly improve their ability to learn new things. It will expose them to a whole host of thoughts, ideas, and areas of exploration that they would otherwise never touch. The thing is, I don't have a degree. I have a LOT of one (well two actually). I feel that it's ok, because the last 30 hours or so that I'm missing are basically all computer science. That's the stuff I've been able to learn. Still I can't imagine not having the college education that I do have. I use what I learned in psychology almost every day (absolutely essential for anyone trying to run a company). I use the lessons learned in history and literature to guide my decision making. Philosophy has greatly influenced HOW I interact with others and informs the type of team that I want to have. College made me a much better entrepreneur and it did it only four years! Give me that experience every day over someone who skipped college. Now, can you get all of that elsewhere? Of course. You can learn to program. That's easy. You can read every day. Of course. But unless you are a remarkable human being (and they do exist), you'll never achieve the breadth of knowledge that comes with a degree. Hell I'm all for restructuring how we think about education. The answer isn't to eliminate it. Instead lets decouple the skills training aspect. Liberal arts degrees for everyone!

rhizome 13y ago

To be fair, the slogan their late-term marketing consultant came up with was pretty lame.

drp4929 13y ago
Your response seems to assume that she has earned MBA, but she has not. http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliesupan http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliesupan
joelandren 13y ago
To be fair, there's a lot more to user acquisition than a slogan.

weixiyen 13y ago

You don't need an MBA to solve those problems. It's a problem with prioritization, not lack of ability.

EricDeb 13y ago
That's exactly what an MBA does. Teaches you to prioritize effectively. It also gives you countless examples of businesses who don't, and the consequences they suffer. Sometimes learning these lessons in the real world can be very costly.
- NirDremer 13y ago
  MBA is great but I think your expectations are high. Oftentimes the issue is not knowledge but rather working at high pressure and to do it well nothing beats experience & good mentors.
- ringdabell 13y ago
  One of the biggest myth about getting an MBA is that you learn anything at all. The two primary motivations for getting an MBA are completely unrelated to obtaining an "education": 1. Career transformation (i.e. you're a marketer that wants to go into banking.. basically impossible to get interviews without going to bschool) 2. Obtain a professional network "Learning" is really a tertiary priority.

cookiecaper 13y ago

Does an MBA inoculate someone from making these judgment errors? If so, I personally know multiple MBA-holders who've made similar errors who should be informed that they deserve their money back or something. It's important to be aware of the necessity to perform those business functions that coders probably would rather not bother with, but once that happens, I find that technical people tend to make much, much better judgment calls than their business school superiors. In reality, it's rare to find people who're daring enough to apply simple rationality across most or all spectra, regardless of their background. Unfortunately, an MBA seemingly does very little to mitigate this, and it's the core problem. Yes, people could hypothetically learn, but most don't. I don't understand why we've all fooled ourselves into believing that four years of rote memorization and arbitrary compliance will do anything. I guess it being a much more fundamental problem is scary, because as simple as it may be, it's apparently quite difficult for most people to change. We have a big problem with our educational and hiring cultures.

ryanhuff 13y ago
Does an MBA inoculate someone from making these judgment errors? If so, I personally know multiple MBA-holders who've made similar errors who should be informed that they deserve their money back or something. An MBA inoculates somebody from making poor decisions just as much as anybody having expertise in any specific field. As you would agree, nobody is beyond making a poor decision. Let's also be clear than an MBA is a broadly defined credential, as there are a host of specializations (including Human Resources management, Marketing, Finance, etc) that are often bundled within the "degree". However, from what was described in the Everpix case, I am confident that somebody with the right mix of educational training in early-stage venture management (MBA w/entrepreneurship concentration) and smarts could have added value.

megablast 13y ago

I am going to tackle this, from a coders point of view, you can very quickly see if someone is any good. Or a designer, sysad, most other things. But MBA are like economists, they all have different ideas on how to advance, and it is very hard to actually hard to test them, takes a long time to see if they were actually correct, if they fail they have a good reason, and it all sounds like something you could have worked out anyway.

argonaut 13y ago

Let's be clear: learning about those lessons will take maybe, at most, a month or two of reading a couple of books, reading PG's essays, and reading a few of the blogs written by great entrepreneurs and VCs. That's it. An MBA probably does teach you this - it just doesn't need to take two years and XYZ thousand dollars. There's a lot of fluff in an MBA that's just not necessary for a startup. The fact also remains that the vast majority of people I know who got an MBA did it for the network, not for the education.

lazyjones 13y ago

> People on HN crap all over MBAs, but these are the types of problems many of them have been trained to solve. So, didn't their investor have any MBAs? These are also the kinds of problems VC investors are supposed to advise on, to protect, you know, their investment.

mathattack 13y ago

Is this an issue of needing an MBA, or just needing to think about marketing and finance?