

Can business schools teach entrepreneurship? - nathanh
http://giffconstable.com/2010/02/can-business-schools-teach-entrepreneurship/

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jasonlbaptiste
UMiami offers an entrepreneurship major. I feel like it's very targeted
towards a small business owner for a local establishment ie- restaurant owner,
services provider,etc. That's nice and all, but it's pretty limiting. I don't
think you could teach guys like us how to do what we do in a classroom. I will
say, it might be useful to have some type of crash course that focused on some
of the more mundane things you'll need:

term sheet negotiations, basic accounting, legal docs stuff, interviewing
skills, some public speaking (for conferences/demos),etc.

There's certainly a large world of entrepreneurship out there beyond the tech
sector, but I bet there's some type of common ground that can be found.

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electromagnetic
I personally don't believe you'll ever teach entrepreneurship how people here
at HN are interpreting it. We expect to take nothing but our time and
hopefully one day sell it for millions.

Hackers are no different than writers (which I am), musicians and artists. We
start with nothing, and produce something worth far more than the sum of its
parts.

If you want an entrepreneurship course to tell if you have the material of a
true entrepreneur then here's my suggestion: Find a way to throw 100g of shit
at a fan (that is running) and have it not splatter.

Here's the grading breakdown; 1) If you get the shit through without it
splattering or being cut, you've got the makings of a billionaire. 2) If you
get the shit through with slicing, but no splattering, you've got the makings
of a millionaire. 3) If the shit hits the fan and splatters, you might as well
get a day job and hope you make 6-figures.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Create a fan with a hole in the center so you can throw the shit through it.
The fan rotates around it- the center is just bigger and hollow rather than
something fancy. The fan might be bigger, but the shit won't splatter.

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dlevine
> I would argue that if you really want to start a company, but don’t feel
> like you are ready, an MBA should be your _fallback_ position.

This was pretty much why I went to business school. Except I didn't think
about it as my fallback position. I kind of thought of it as a way to ease
myself between a cushy paycheck and the wild.

Overall, my conclusion is that business school is pretty useless for starting
a business. Very few people start companies straight out of top business
schools (too much money in taking job), and most of what you "learn" about
entrepreneurship isn't actually all that useful. Sure I learned how to write a
business plan, but I never actually needed that business plan once we got
started (and we completely changed the idea within a month).

