I suspect our differences are mostly semantic. I consider all entrepreneurs to be businessmen (although not the reverse, of course). You may have a different definition. That's ok!
Here's the way I view it:
- Look at YC as a transfer function. In go individuals who want to learn how to successfully start a business. Out go many individuals who do indeed succeed starting a business.
- Look at HBS at a transfer function. Difference is that the individuals spend a lot more time inside the black box, do a lot more "makework", usually end up with debt not equity, and fewer of them succeed at starting a business. Still a great institution! And clearly many HBS students want to go work for Goldman Sachs, and go on to have great careers doing so.
I'm just saying that higher ed needs to be reinvented, and that reinvention will necessarily happen in ways that dont look like conventional education. Like YC.
To whatever extent business schools are replaced by something like YC, it'll be to the same extent that large businesses are replaced by smaller and more granular businesses generating massively more revenue per employee. That was more or less what I was hinting at with the battleship/dive bomber analogy. It's not that YC is taking the place of business school, or that the types of people who went to and thrived in business school will be attracted to YC. It's that creative people like hackers and designers will learn just enough business to handle it themselves and the types of people who get MBA's will have to learn to work for a living.
Here's the way I view it:
- Look at YC as a transfer function. In go individuals who want to learn how to successfully start a business. Out go many individuals who do indeed succeed starting a business.
- Look at HBS at a transfer function. Difference is that the individuals spend a lot more time inside the black box, do a lot more "makework", usually end up with debt not equity, and fewer of them succeed at starting a business. Still a great institution! And clearly many HBS students want to go work for Goldman Sachs, and go on to have great careers doing so.
I'm just saying that higher ed needs to be reinvented, and that reinvention will necessarily happen in ways that dont look like conventional education. Like YC.