Haas EMBAs Follow Silicon Valley’s Expansion

Haas EMBA student Joe Peters speaks during a presentation at MyFitnessPal in San Francisco - Ethan Baron photo

Haas EMBA student Joe Peters speaks during a presentation at MyFitnessPal in San Francisco – Ethan Baron photo

Inkenbrandt had come into Haas while working in engineering management for a company that had just been bought. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says. He calls his Haas Silicon Valley Immersion Week “extremely transformative.” After he graduated in December 2014, his startup received funding the following March, and in October 2015 closed the firms first contract, for $250,000, Inkenbrandt said. The Haas network was invaluable for starting up, he says. He met his cofounder via the network, and the company’s lead investor runs Cal Founders, a group of U.C. Berkeley alumni involved in entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship, of course, carries a risk of failure that is inescapable. There are no business school lessons that can prepare students to launch sure-bet startups. “There’s no forecasting the experience you’re going to have, period,” Stuart says. “So much of it is going to depend on so many small random events, and it’s impossible to tell anybody who starts an organization and they’re going to take a serious run at it what their life is going to be like.”

Also impossible to forecast is the future of the tech sector, and Stuart notes that interest in elite MBA programs rises with the tech industry’s level of “froth” – investor overconfidence leading to overblown valuation and pricing, signifying a possible bubble.

“Whatever the froth is today it’s basically guaranteed that it will be different next year, and they’re making choices that are down-the-road choices,” Stuart says. “To a certain extent that applies to jobs in private equity or at BCG or Google: they’re all sector bets and the students are pretty sensitive to sectors that are pumping. I’m not exactly sure what a good alternative to that strategy is, because these things are not forecastable. When the markets pull back, which they will, the less-interested will race for the exits first, and that’s OK.

“I’m about to start a full-time MBA course and my guess is about a third of the conversation will be about bubbles.”

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