Despite What Sheryl Sandberg Says, MBAs Still Matter

Facebook’s COO and, ironically enough, Harvard Business School alumna - has also voiced that MBAs are superfluous in tech. In a post on Quora last December, Sandberg had apparently written, “While I got great value from my experience, MBAs are not necessary at Facebook and I don’t believe they are important for working in the tech industry."

As these high-profile entrepreneurs have sworn off hiring MBAs, business school grads might be having the last laugh. Perhaps while PayPal’s Thiel views MBAs as sheep-like and having “herd-like thinking and behavior,” B-School grads may actually be more majestic than that: Unicorns.

According to analysis from NextView Ventures, 1 in 4 Unicorns has at least one founder who has an MBA. To be more specific, there are 63 MBA founders among the 157 Unicorns out there, which shows that some Unicorns have multiple founders with business school background.

Among all of the MBA programs molding Unicorn founders, Sandberg’s (as in the same Sandberg that said you don’t need a business degree to succeed in tech) alma mater, HBS, has been the most significant contributor, which could be due to the university’s large class sizes. There are 14 Unicorns that have HBS alumni as founders. That figure is followed by Stanford GSB’s contribution to the Unicorn realm - 8 companies with alumni - as well as Wharton and INSEAD (in France) with 5 startups started by grads.

So while the startup space can be more accessible to people without business degrees, it wouldn’t be fair to say that MBAs are completely useless. With the vast majority of ventures failing, having an MBA presence at 1 in 4 Unicorns - startups that are crushing it - might not be a coincidence. Anyone may be able to start a company nowadays, but it could take the business school touch to make a company successful.