The Value of Education
Startup CEOs need to bring a diverse set of skills to the table, yet what is the right balance between leveraging formal education and real-world experience to build that skill set?
No doubt leading a startup requires a diversity of skills. In fact, investors might even be wise to be on the lookout for startup CEO’s who have a bit of a jack of all trades background because a working knowledge of different business functions, technical disciplines, and even industries can provide a strong foundation to draw upon when solving the myriad problems that confront a developing startup.
Lately, I have had several conversations with aspiring entrepreneurs who are puzzling through how to develop the right skills and experiences to take on the role of startup CEO. They tell me “I want to be able to do your job” and then ask how to take the background they already have and further develop it.
Before I delve into the drawbacks, let me establish that, in general, I am a big fan of college educations. I believe that college represents a unique phase in personal development. Critical thinking, team problem-solving, interpersonal skills, and self-organization all develop in the college environment. Success in college demands self-discipline and self-motivation. You have an opportunity to choose areas to focus on and there is a push to both cover a diversity of topics as well as to focus on a major(s). Even going beyond that into a master’s degree or even a technical Ph.D. can build a strong foundation for a technical co-founder. Fundamentally, I believe that college forms an important and solid base for future aspiring entrepreneurial leaders.
However, sometimes I see attempts to use advanced education to cover all of the diverse knowledge bases required of a startup CEO. An overreaching/overleveraging of formal education can take a good thing too far. For example, someone with engineering undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees wants to layer on other PhDs, an MBA, and even an MD. Clearly and explicitly looking to leverage academic education to build a broad-based skill set. While conceptually, this approach might work because a startup leader might need knowledge in all these complementary areas, there is a downside. Formal education requires great investments of time and money, so amassing this much education can prove to be an expensive investment from both a resources and an opportunity cost point of view. And it is an investment that produces a fundamentally incomplete result.
What I have seen is that academic education cannot substitute for the experiences of building and leading teams, solving real-world business and technical problems, and gaining concrete experience in a number of domains. The time invested in pursuing formal education leaves practical gaps in experience. There is a difference between the organized case studies and material that have been curated in a formal education and the messiness and complexity of real-world problem-solving. An MBA teaches the language and basic tools of business, however, the challenges of recruiting, growing and managing a startup team and group of critical stakeholders are not readily taught except once you get out and start doing it. Similarly, technical problem-solving often comes down to figuring out the right dimensions of a problem to include and exclude, and this is often as much art based on experience as anything else. As I have hired over the years, I have found that there is tremendous value in peoples’ experiences, both successes and failures, and often I have found that, for startups who have lean teams, it is critical to build the core team with experienced team members because what they have learned applying their creativity in the real-world dwarfs the basic frameworks learned in formal education.
As I described in my blog highlighting the importance of continuously learning, I recommend being a life-long learner and constantly adding to your store of experiences and domains of expertise. However, realize that formal education is only the beginning and oftentimes, once you have a base foundation and have learned to learn, you will gain the critical skills faster, more readily, and more completely by going out into the world and collaborating with others who compliment you and building complete experiences in all their glorious complexity and messiness. You will also maximize the use of your most precious and finite resources – your time and attention – by not over-investing in formal education at the expense of practical, relevant experience in the real world.
