Its not clear at all an MBA gives a competitive advantage to a startup founder in the current era. It is true that many companies fail for reasons that may hav

Its not clear at all an MBA gives a competitive advantage to a startup founder in the current era. It is true that many companies fail for reasons that may have been more obvious to an MBA than a lay-person, but failure-mitigation and success propogation are only co-incidentally linked. Failure mitigation is a boundary constraint, not a primary explanatory relationship or variable. Common sense business advisory, industry networking, and start-up specific logistical information is now provided by a variety of experts and emergent institutions (eg, YC and other accelerators, with VCs and Board members, and en extremis a variety of biz-dev types available for consultancy and freelance work.) There are definitly also counter-examples, and one that comes to mind is Gilt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilt_Groupe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilt_Groupe), but I'm not sure this isn't the type of exception that proves the rule. That is to say entrenpreneurs build starups, and they may may not have, need, or want an MBA. The other consideration here is survivorship bias. Many people in the "mba cohort" may have de-risked their entry into the middle class/management ranks such that it just doesn't make sense to take any path more risky. That is to say, the development of firm-specific (and tech specific) skills inherent in a startup may prevent the MBA from following up a failed opportunity and jumping back into an "MBA" career path on even ground, if the field is something like banking, consulting, marketing, ect...ie, the traditional MBA paths. Its not clear that such an experience adds significant market value in many areas. Although there are paths where such would obviously be useful, especially in combination with some technical savvy and business acumen. So in other words, this may be as much about doing (x|MBA) as it is (x) itself.