Bschools everywhere are falling all over themselves these days to serve as incubators forhot new ideas from enterprising students. EssaySnark remains unconvinced that getting an MBA is the best route to launching a company, but we understand the appeal. Universities are resource-rich environments. There’s built-in support, and you get two full years to focus exclusively on your idea (and, well, going to class and getting good grades hopefully, too). We get it. The appeal is obvious. Even though we say if you want to start a company you should just start a company, we know that bschool is a preferred route for many.
We’ve written before about how expensive it is, and we feel that some schools are selling students a bill of goods by dangling all these “opportunities” in front of them — “opportunities” in quotes because it still comes down to the founder’s smarts and sweat and willingness to manage massive amounts of ambiguity and uncertainty and risk. So it was kinda cool when a Brave Supplicant gave us a heads-up about a report published by PitchBook, a company that builds software used in deal finance, that tracks which universities and MBA programs have spit out companies that are worth something.
You can find it on their site here and we’re also preserving it on essaysnark.com in case that link goes dead in the future. [UPDATE: In the time between this post was originally written in Spring 2018 and the time we slated to publish it in near-Fall, Pitchbook released a new version – Business Insider covered it here .]
It’s one of those things that can be a total distraction — you open it up and you inadvertently dump two hours into it — but if you’re seriously thinking about schools for entrepreneurship, and you want to examine them on the basis of past performance and actual outcomes to date, then it’s not a bad place to start.
A big h/t and thank-you to the former BSer who pointed us to this!
And oh yeah: That BSer has now launched into his MBA experience at a great school and if he’s reading this, we’d love to get an update to hear how things are going!
If you’re serious about going to bschool to start a business, then you’ll need to pitch that very carefully in your apps. The Entrepreneurial Career Goals Guide will point out the pitfalls and help you craft a solid plan for the adcom to get behind.
Tell us what you think.