Alexander Mimran's Blog

Most of what you learn in business school is how to run a business. Primarily how to be a CEO or business manager in a large company. Understanding financial accounting, marketing, organizational behavior, economic theory, and the list of requisite classes goes on. While these are great skills to have, none of them come into play when starting a startup, especially a lean startup.

As the slide above states, being an entrepreneur isn't applying what you've learned in the past, but what you are learning as you go. Your customers are your teachers and you are the student. You must throw away your business plan and instead focus on trying to find a scalable and repeatable business model. This means testing out hypotheses, often being very wrong, until you create a product that people are dying for. Having an MBA won't help you here, and what Steve Blank has been teaching at Stanford is how all business schools should be approaching entrepreneurship. There's no formula for success. There are formulas to help you succeed, but if your customers hate your product, your knowledge of venture financing isn't going to change that. 

So for those of you who have gone to B-School and want to create web products, forget what you learned and start asking questions. Get out of the building, talk to customers, and start learning again. A Lea(r)n Startup!