Peter Thiel (Billionaire and VC legend) hates MBAs. Thoughts?

Me fucking too

Isn't Paypal fining people $2500 for "misinformation" (whatever that means)? That seems like globohomo herd mentality with deranged communists running the asylum

Unless you're doing a major career pivot, MBAs are a waste of dough.

People always argue "it's about the network you get", but having taken graduate level courses myself while in college you can learn almost all of the subjects on your own. It's hard to justify a $100k expenditure IMO

I personally never went for an MBA, always wondered whether that was the right move. My role and comp are the same compared to colleagues /w an MBA (who were mostly career switchers).

1) There is an advantage to meet other cultures and backgrounds when you attend business school. My friends and colleagues with an MBA say they have met so many Chinese and Indian people who they became friends with. I think there is value in that.

2) As said above, career switchers. If someone really wants to work in industry X, an MBA might be the ticket for that.

3) I do believe that MBA folks do thinks "in a similar way", not calling it herd mentality. But the business schools have a curriculum that is not entirely different.

EDIT

I forgot to add
4) You are entrepreneurial and are looking for smart co-founders. Business school might accomplish that.
Not saying you need a piece of paper to start the right company, but your CTO might be sitting next to you.

Peter Thiel is as close as we have to the devil in the flesh.

As an MBA-holder, I think there is an element of truth in what Thiel says. I strongly believe that the MBA degree is only worth it if it comes from a top school. An MD or JD is valuable even if it doesn't come from a top school because it allows you to practice medicine or law. An MBA confers no practical benefits and its value is derived entirely from the branding and network associated with it. The educational content is marginal at best and the credential itself is close to worthless.

I see so many misguided lost souls on LinkedIn who put the MBA after their name as a suffix (e.g. John Smith, MBA) Invariably, these people got their MBA from some state school or worse (e.g. a for-profit university / diploma mill)

If you have an opportunity to do an MBA from a school like Harvard or Stanford - just do it.

If it's not a top school - don't bother.

There is not necessarily a correct or incorrect framework to address this topic, as the value of an MBA may vary for different people based on their individual circumstances. It’s pointless to make generalizations or put blanket statements on MBA graduates or the experience. It is expensive but it’s up to the individual to decide if the time and capital investment is worth making.

People in MBA programs often come from a wide range of backgrounds and use the opportunity to rebrand, build a larger and newer network and learn. For someone already in finance who went ib to pe or a2a with the opportunity to keep advancing, an MBA may not provide as much additional value compared to someone who came from an engineering, media or healthcare etc background, who after five years of working, decided to go into consulting or finance. 

There is also a greater focus on people skills - networking, management, building relationships that may or may not always be emphasized in undergraduate as well. 

Agree with Thiel.  And I'm an MBA.  But he's still right.

MBAs are usually low conviction people.  They often take the easy or safe way out of every major decision, framing it within the confines of what's already been said.  They're generally less creative and more into cookie cutter answers to things.  

Everything is a generalization of course.  But I think this inside-the-box mindset is frequently a problem with MBAs.  You can google things Steve Jobs has said about consultants & "professional management" and it mirrors a lot of Thiel's criticism of MBAs.

Another useful observation from Thiel, which I think relates to this.  He said the reason founders are socially awkward, isn't because there's something about being socially awkward that makes you more able to start a company.  The reason founders are awkward is that we've taken all of the non-awkward, extroverted people and funneled them into a traditional white collar jobs.  Leaving nobody else to act on fresh new ideas except the awkward ones.  

For EU, MBA is useless. There is 0 added value in your career/life progression, aside from being more valuable than leaving industry altogether due to burnout.

I struggle to understand how MBA is still a thing. At least CFA is finally recognised as being completely useless rubber stamp, took way too long though.

I think this quote is very old. MBAs have changed quite a bit and they aren't as worthless as they used to be.

MBAs are the peak of herd mentality. You really need to be brainwashed to throw 6 figures for a piece of paper. All those arguments: chance to network, meeting international people, otherwise I can't get into IB, taking a career break, learning new things, etc., once you stop and think about them, you'll just spot that they're lame (read: coping) and you could accomplish all of those at ^100 by doing something else like traveling abroad, reading on your own, reaching to anyone you want and invite them for a meeting, etc.

The reality is that many people are constrained to go after an MBA because the industry prefers MBAs. It creates a vicious cycle as many executives have an MBA and thus the company will end up preferring MBAs in order to perpetuate a culture where juniors can see a reflection of their future selves in the executives and viceversa, the executives in the juniors. It's herd mentality because you just follow what other people expects from you. You can't create your own path and face adversity while doing so, so you just adhere to conventional paths (= average).

Regarding the career change argument, the MBA reflects a real commitment to changing your career (throwing 6 figures must mean that you're serious about doing something else), but again, HR or the firm must be really stupid to believe that someone who throws 6 figures on a diploma has more interest in a position than someone who doesn't. So you need to play according to their rules no matter how retarded they are. Personally, I'll prefer to recruit the guy who didn't spend 6 figures for a diploma, because at best, it demonstrates consciousness and awareness on what matters and what not (assuming he knows his shit).

Peter Thiel, Warren Buffett, and many others who have some unique paths also hate MBAs because it's a masturbatory community where you just lose time and money for a diploma that teaches you nothing. In other words, congratulations, you spent 6 figures to join the rat race and be one from the many unable to add any value. 

MBAs are a mixed bag, they can be very herd like and indecisive. How many people go to consulting to avoid being “pigeon holed”? How many went into tech because it’s hot? For those that actually make a decision, they tend to be good. It’s shocking to see someone with 5 years of work experience, not having a strong industry or functional preference. 

Find it ironic, out of touch and suspicious when the highly educated talk down traditional education.

If you go to a target (Thiel went to Stanford for BA/JD), maybe even a semi-target, then the need for an MBA is lessened; many people get their MBAs to dilute their no-name undergrad. 

Top MBAs are a rich kid's vacation. This is well known and understood. 

If you watch enough Thiel videos, you will know that this umbrella of low conviction people and mimetic competition is also an umbrella that bankers fall within. Peter himself worked in big law for 7 months before realizing it was 0 sum. 

MBA’s are currently ruining big tech by only focusing on the immediate bottom line rather than long term R&D, and long term goals and  initiatives. They are turning these companies into pure sales-driven firms that focus on the now and churn out shitty subpar products as long as they sell, while trying to buy up anything else they consider to be competition. 
 

These guys don’t know how to write one line of code, and most of them are the product of nepotism. Hard for me to respect them tbh. Also why I stick to working at private companies - so that my fate isn’t determined by an idiotic board of directors. 

hes not wrong

For what it's worth, I'll chime in with my MBA experience as a career switcher. 

TLDR: MBA was too high level, didn't deliver the technical skills I sought, and as I went when I was very young I went to a lower-tier top-ten at the time (now a top 12), I feel the brand benefit was negligible. If I could do it again, I would have put off the MBA, studied Wall Street Prep / BIWS / WSO for the modeling, and studied the CFA for content (not necessarily to take the test, but just to self-study finance). I could have also looked into MS Finance or MS Financial Engineering instead of an MBA. My take is that the MBA is a branding exercise and a 2-year recruiting exercise, not designed to give you skills or knowledge. It is a cost in money and time. Whether it's worth it depends on what you want to do, and what it costs you to do it. Ultimately the MBA is a membership at a club of your alumni. So you need to choose that club carefully. 

Context: I studied an engineering major undergrad at a top-tier target school and graduated in the top 2% of my class with scholarships and academic distinctions, but my major was not in a desirable specialization. I focused on recruiting for strategy consulting and while I made final rounds at many of the consulting firms, including BCG, McKinsey, Monitor (super day), Accenture (super day), I just couldn't get the offer. I just didn't have the business background to competently address the cases.

After undergrad I found myself struggling to get my feet under me. I worked as a financial analyst for real estate developers, but was underpaid. I applied to MBA to break out of that pattern. I attended a good state-school MBA (Berkeley, Michigan, UCLA), so my all-in was a bargain $26k for my MBA, and my room and board was free because I crashed on my mom's couch while I attended school. I thought the MBA would plug the hole in my technical knowledge and give me another bite at the recruiting apple. It sort of did that, in that I was rebranded as a business person not an engineer, but I did not have the success I desired from on-campus recruiting. I did not get consulting interviews at all, and ended up getting a BB offer in fixed income. Later I changed to another part of finance.

I was disappointed with the MBA's lack of technical skills. The MBA was good for high-level education and a broad background in business. But the MBA failed to deliver modeling, any real depth in technical subjects like accounting and finance, etc.  One does of course take basic accounting and finance classes in MBA as part of the Core. But those classes are very high-level, you're required to only take one class of each, and you don't have enough time to go deep into any of them.  You're balancing those accounting and finance classes with requirements for statistics, operations, strategy, and other soft classes like marketing and organizational behavior. So the valuable classes (accounting, finance, possibly strategy) are coupled with less-useful classes that suck up your time and attention, thereby diluting your efforts. Time is very limited in the MBA and that makes for a less content-driven education than an MS finance / financial engineer. You just don't have enough time to go deep enough and become competent.

You're also spending a lot of time on recruiting, which further dilutes the value of the MBA from a learning standpoint. Mind you, I was very focused on recruiting and on classes, but you just don't have enough time to do it all. As I was not from a business background (other than knowing my way around a basic real estate financial model) I was way behind many classmates from a starting point. If you don't come in to MBA case-studies / project work with solid modeling experience from your pre-MBA experience, your team will simply let you be the one doing modeling on your team projects, even if you put your hand up to do that. So you'll not be able to use the MBA to practice modeling (and again, the MBA doesn't teach modeling).  The 1-day TTS or Wall St Prep class that you take on a Saturday is just not going to cut it to get you up to speed on modeling. No ibank will hire you because you took WSP's intro to modeling for 4-6 hours.   

After graduating I still ended up self-studying financial modeling on my own time and watching CFA-lesson videos on corporate finance. So why did I even need to invest 2 years in classes at the #9-12 lower-band-top-10 MBA?  If I could do it again I would have just studied Wall Street Prep / BIWS / WSO for the modeling, or the CFA videos for content. Which is what I ended up doing later anyway.  I could have studied an MS finance / financial engineering to go deeper into technical aspects The MBA is only worth it if the cost is controlled (sponsorship, scholarship or weekend/evening MBA) or you attend an M7 to rebrand. The MBA is absolutely optional from a content standpoint, and so the real value is the brand, alumni, and recruiting. 

I would advise any monkey to first learn the business content (accounting, finance, modeling) BEFORE you go to b-school. Counterintuitive as that may be. You want b-school to be a cake-walk and a repetition of what you already learned not to start learning, and use the MBA to rebrand and relaunch your career through on-campus recruiting.

My wife failed out of her MBA (INSEAD) for not hitting her academic minimum. She is currently studying for CFA L1 and has said that if she had prepped for the CFA prior to going to b-school she would have had a much easier time academically. The self-paced nature of the CFA and the wide availability of video prep courses means you can get a lot of the MBA content (maybe even *more* than the MBA content) online, whether or not you attend b-school. The structured nature of the CFA and the fact that it's been around a long time means there's tons of materials out there, and those materials are well organized. You don't even have to take the test - just study the well-organized prep materials. Not sure if CFA study is better than BIWS/WSP or possibly even Coursera classes (which I haven't taken).  

I think the MBA has a value in that it shows the candidate is able to do the work to get into a good program and has a broad business foundation, but it's hardly some magic toolkit that makes the candidate a good decision-maker or business person. The distinction of 'leader' has to be earned in the field, grinding it out.  

RANT: I think the very term "Magic 7" is obscene and pompous. I still remember the self-important attitude of the finance club people who outreached from one of the M7s to have my PE fund meet the students. Unbelievable. 

Peter Thiel, a billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist, has been known to be critical of MBA programs and the traditional business education they provide. Thiel has stated that MBA programs often focus on theoretical concepts and outdated business models, rather than providing practical knowledge and skills that are relevant to the modern business world. He also argues that MBA programs can be overly focused on career advancement and networking, rather than on developing real-world business skills.

However, it is important to note that Thiel's views on MBA's are not universally held, and many people find value in the education and networking opportunities provided by MBA programs. Additionally, it is important to consider the source of the statement. Thiel is a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist, but his perspective may not necessarily apply to all business fields or career paths.

This guy also likes man butt so keep that in mind…he’s just another personality buttressed (no pun intended) by some early dumb luck 

Everyone hates MBAs why are you acting like this is a hot topic? It’s obviously a BS degree that people undergo only for a vacation from being grinded or switch careers.

The only reasons banks hire them is they’re more likely to stay and it shows a slight credential