Over the last year, I've seen many Y Combinator companies raise funds.  YC companies are able to raise money faster than most companies, including those that have more progress to show.  While the YC name attached to a company definitely helps, there is more going on here.  YC companies get valuable advice from Paul Graham and the YC network of alumni.  Through feedback and iteration, they learn how to play the venture fundraising game.

Smart entrepreneurs learn to pick out which teachings should be followed and which should be discarded. 

Getting Real by the guys from 37 signals

"We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. Our products do less than the competition – intentionally. We build products that work smarter, feel better, allow you to do things your way, and are easier to use."  

"Your startup is an organization built to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.  Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted."

"This is what productivity looks like.  This is the Formula 1 racecar.  It looks weird but it goes fast."

MBA recruiting programs focus almost entirely on on-campus recruiting.  Students are wined and dined literally on day #1 by large companies such as McKinsey, BCJ, General Mills, JP Morgan.  It's an unbelievable process with expensive dinners, networking sessions, mountains of shwag.  Remember, MBA programs are designed to help people prepare for the very careers these companies are offering.  The integration of the career development office and the structure of the MBA program is almost seamless.  Most of that process takes place in the fall, culminating in on-campus interviews in late January.

By the time you get to April/May/June when startups are ready to seriously think about hiring interns, the vast majority of the class already has their BigCo internship.  And because those BigCo internships will most likely lead to full-time offers, those MBAs have a sense of certainty and stability that can be very alluring.  They have large paychecks coming, pre-internship retreats at fancy resorts, Facebook groups filled with successful, attractive people, mentor assigned, etc.

There are two types of MBAs that apply for a startup job in the late spring: those that failed at snagging a BigCo internship and those that deliberately waited.  For the former, they are beaten down and depressed, desperately looking for a plan B.  For the latter, they deserve kudos for sticking to their guns.  Regardless of whether it was deliberate or not, an MBA pursuing an internship needs to understand that the process can take just as much work as getting a BigCo internship--only, there's no career development process bringing startups to campus to make it super easy.

I've seen most MBAs fail at getting good internships with early stage startups.

________

I had an MBA come into our office a couple of weeks ago to seek advice on getting an internship with a startup this summer.  I asked him what he wanted to do, and he responded:

"I'm willing to do anything.  I could help do analysis, anything with excel/powerpoint, could help raise money--really anything.  I just want to be involved."

Oy.

Let's translate this sentence from the perspective of a founder:

Willing to do anything:  You have no idea what we do on a day-to-day basis and you'll need me to figure out something to do to keep you busy.

I could help do analysis, anything with excel/powerpoint:  You basically have two skills, both involving Microsoft office products.  You'll spend a week on the most complex, gorgeous spreadsheet I've ever seen, totally ignoring that fact that it's garbage in, garbage out.  

could help raise money: You think that your presentation skills are so good that you'd be better in front of investors than the actual founder.  You don't understand that investors look for determination, passion, technical ability, and authenticity. 

I just want to be involved: Your classmates have sweet-ass internships with consulting firms and banks, getting paid $25k to party all summer.  You're making a huge sacriface to be here.  We should be so lucky to have you!  We just have to make sure we keep you entertained all summer.

There's a place for an MBA like this--it's just with a bigger company that has a more formalized internship program.  Series A and pre-funded startups don't have time for this sort of mindset.  They need 100% of the people on board building stuff, not strategizing on stuff.  A non-technical startup person needs to be kicking ass on user experience mock-ups, business development, marketing, social media, SEO.  They should be bringing their execution skills to the table, not asking for a good learning experience.

Contrast this with a hacker that contacted us recently for an internship.  He first contacted us through twitter by RT'ing us and responding to interesting posts.  He then showed us his open source projects and then offered to spend his spring break hacking with us.  In two weeks, he really helped us move forward on some big architecture problems.  I would do anything for him--hire him, recommend him, anything.  I've never seen his resume, read his cover letter, or checked a reference on him.  But he knew how to contribute.

MBAs!  You too can contribute through an internship!  But YOU have to go the extra mile.

A few suggestions for getting a job with a startup:

1. Pick the right size of start-up where your current skill set can be utilized

2. Read the startup's blog and add to the discussion with insightful comments

3. Follow the founders on Twitter and RT and @respond when appropriate

4. Engage with the general startup community: Build up your twitter account, blog readership, and Hacker News karma score

5. Learn the startup's actual challenges by talking to people in advance of requesting an internship

6. Propose your own internship project

7. Do an unsolicited proof-of-abilities project in photoshop or balsamiq if you want to be product manager

8. Do an unsolicited SEO analysis if you want to do marketing

9. Be respectful but uber-persistant

10. Move to where you want to work

11. Accept the fact that the best opportunities become available in May and June

12. Get other founders to highly recommend you

13. Throw away your resumes and cover letters--they're no longer needed.

Most importantly, try to internalize the risks a startup CEO faces when bringing in a non-technical MBA intern.  The actual cost is probably not much if the company has already raised money and if the internship is subsidized by the MBA program.  The real cost is in focus, time, and company culture.  Getting a startup to devote their time to you is a huge risk to them and you need to prove that that risk is worth it.  

In contrast, a large company will treat its internship program as mostly an advanced hiring process.  You don't actually need to contribute that much since the internship is little more than an extended interview process.  For startups, they can't even think about hiring that far into the future, so you have to be worth it on contributed value alone.

Find discussion of this post on Hacker News.

******************

I'm Jason Freedman.  I co-founded FlightCaster.  

I would be remiss not to recommend the following opportunity: @JasonFreedman.

Don't be shy.  You can send me a Linkedin request or become my bff on Facebook.

 

I regularly can't fall asleep.  

I often can't fall asleep even when I feel tired.  

Once asleep, I generally sleep through the night just fine.  

It's nearly impossible for me to wake up early in the morning.  

Pulling an all-nighter is surprisingly easy for me.  

I generally direct my lifestyle to avoid morning commitments.

I have delayed sleep phase syndrome, a common form of insomnia.  Sound familiar anyone? 

Or as Wikipedia describes it:

 

Attempting to force oneself onto daytime society's schedule with DSPS has been compared to constantly living with 6 hours of jet lag; the disorder has, in fact, been referred to as "social jet lag".[7] Often, sufferers manage only a few hours sleep a night during the working week, then compensate by sleeping until the afternoon on weekends. Sleeping in on weekends, and/or taking long naps during the day, may give people with the disorder relief from daytime sleepiness but may also perpetuate the late sleep phase.
People with DSPS can be called extreme night owls. They feel most alert and say they function best and are most creative in the evening and at night. DSPS patients cannot simply force themselves to sleep early. They may toss and turn for hours in bed, and sometimes not sleep at all, before reporting to work or school. Less extreme and more flexible night owls, and indeed morning larks, are within the normalchronotype spectrum.

I have an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.  It was some of the best experiences of my life.  I met fabulous friends, learned from incredible professors, and developed in many important my ways.  My entrepreneurship professor, Gregg Fairbrothers, is one of my all-time favorite teachers and he taught me a lot about doing start-ups right.  The professors and administrators at Tuck never claimed they were teaching me how to run a startup.  In fact, they were explicitly teaching general management curriculum to be applied towards larger businesses.

The problem that I see a lot now that I've been in startup land for 4 years is that too many MBAs think that their education in business can be applied directly to startups.  They forget that startups are not a smaller version of a larger company.  Applying a set of frameworks designed for success with larger companies is a good way to guarantee failure when dealing with start-ups.  Professors like Gregg Fairbrothers preach this all the time.  Yet, I still get calls regularly from MBA friends ready to do their first start-up, believing that their MBA education will give them the right tools.

The reality is, we MBAs come with a lot of baggage.  A good way to understand why MBAs are damaged goods for startups is to understand the actual curriculum.  

 Here are standard core courses at any business school: 

Strategy: 

 This is the most dangerous of all MBA courses.  In this course, you learn high level analysis, using the 3 C's, the 4 P's, and, of course, Porter's Five Forces.  So, on a typical day, you read a 15-page case on a company's mistakes and then apply one of these frameworks to think through how you would have done it differently.  Doesn't sound so bad right??  Wrong!  This is all high-level business strategy for larger companies.  For a start-up, no one ever knows what will work and what won't.  That's why there's such a focus on iteration in the lean startup methodology.  Great startups figure out what to do by building really fast, listening to customers, and iterating.  More like guess and check.  An MBA, fresh out of a Strategy course, will try to figure out everything on a white board, naively believing that they can think their way out of mistakes.

Accounting: 

In accounting class, you study the annual reports of big companies and learn about gross margin, cash flow statements, balance sheets.  You learn that assets=liabilities + equity and how to convert LIFO to FIFO.  This is all really, really useful if you have warehouse full of stuff and customers that pay on credit.  Pre-revenue start-ups usually have no Cost of Goods Sold, no revenue, none of that.  The only accounting you need is to know how many users are out there, how much it costs to acquire a user, and how much money you'll have from that user.  That and a shoebox to store your receipts until you're ready to pay someone to type them in and do your taxes for you.  An MBA will way-over complicate things with talk of deferred taxes, accrual basis, yada yada--and they forget that their gorgeous, complex set of spreadsheets fails the most basic axiom of all analysis: garbage in, garbage out.

Organizational Behavior:

OB was one of my favorite classes.  I would love to have a company big enough someday to implement some of the stuff on building great structure.  For startups with less than 10 people, all that stuff is irrelevant.  No one in OB tells you to let your top hacker work whenever or wherever he wants or that status meetings are best done standing up or that people are motivated more by technical challenge then by compensation.  To be fair, when you're startup gets big enough (over ~20 people), it rocks to have an MBA come in and start to implement structure just as it's really needed.  Too much structure before that gets in the way of the magic.

Corporate Finance, Financial Markets, Statistics:

Not really sure how these apply to the startup world.  Once I exit for millions of dollars and need to figure out where to put my big pile of cash, they may become more useful.  Our 8 person company doesn't worry about the optimal debt to equity level or whether we should be doing any currency hedges.  Corporate finance for the start-up is best served by reading Signals vs Noise to understand the dangers of raising money and following Venture Hacks to learn the tricks of working with Venture Capitalists.  MBAs will generally know how to read WalMart's annual report but will be lost in the complexities of a cap table.

Management Communication:

This is the most painful to include.  Management Communication teaches how to develop awesome powerpoint presentations.  It's actually a very useful skill and, if you're a consultant for a top tier firm, learning how to put together a perfect leave-behind-deck is invaluable.  For a start-up, you want your presenter to internalize Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule.  You want your decks feeling like a Steve Jobs presentation.  It's about selling a vision, not presenting analysis.  MBA start-up decks always have way too much text, boxes, and arrows.

___

Perhaps the most difficult part lies in the underlying motivation of why people get MBAs.  Any MBA will tell you that it wasn't the academics that drove them to their master's degree.  Unlike almost every other master's field, in which mastering the content is of primary concern, MBAs usually blow off classes after the first semester (especially at the top schools).  Most people get an MBA because of the network.  They have learned that having a group of successful friends will open doors for you.  Pedigree from a top school=better opportunities for success.

For start-ups, only one thing matters.  Can you build something that people want.  Your pedigree is exactly worthless compared to this simple ability to execute.  And for an MBA that just spent 3 years (remember, the application process takes a year!) and over $120,000 building a network, it's really difficult to hear that the network and the education are no longer as big of an asset as you had hoped.