A month out of Haas

I get asked fairly often why I decided to do an MBA. The most complete answer is probably less strategic than people expect.

I applied during the pandemic. Like a lot of people, I had lost a lot of the casual structure that used to create community without much effort. Work was remote. Social life was fragmented. Meeting new people required much more intention than it had before.

An MBA gave me something I did not fully appreciate until I was in it: repeated, structured exposure to the same group of people over a long period of time. That is very different from networking.

You can go to industry events, schedule coffees, join professional groups, and meet a huge number of people. But relationships usually need repetition before they become real. Seeing the same people every week, working on assignments together, arguing about cases, complaining about deadlines, and gradually learning how everyone thinks creates a kind of familiarity that is hard to manufacture elsewhere.

I am fundamentally an introverted person. I can network when I need to, but I am not someone who naturally wants to spend three nights a week meeting strangers in the hope that a few of those interactions eventually turn into friendships.

Haas gave me the structure for that to happen anyway. That ended up being one of the most valuable parts of the experience.

I also think instructor-led learning is undervalued

There is a tendency, especially in tech, to treat formal education as inefficient. You can learn accounting online. You can read about venture capital. There are books on pricing, negotiation, organizational behavior, finance, marketing, and almost anything else taught in business school.

All of that is true. I still think there is a meaningful difference between having access to information and actually learning something well.

A good instructor gives you sequencing, context, feedback, and pressure to engage with material you would probably skip if you were learning entirely on your own. There are subjects I could absolutely have taught myself.

I also know myself well enough to know that I would not have spent several weeks working through capital structures, competitive strategy, or pricing models with the same attention if nobody was expecting me to show up prepared on Tuesday. The classroom matters more than I expected it to.

So does being surrounded by people who approach the same problem from completely different backgrounds. A finance person, an engineer, a consultant, and a founder can read the same case and notice entirely different things. That was useful.

The business side of startups became much less abstract

I came into Haas with a technical background. I knew how products were built. I knew engineering organizations. I had worked at large technology companies and at a startup.

What I understood much less well was how companies look from the other side of the table. How do investors think about a market?

What makes a business attractive beyond having a good product? How do founders think about financing, ownership, pricing, go-to-market, and growth?

How does a venture investor decide whether a company can plausibly become large enough to return a fund? I learned a lot about startups and venture capital from the business side without having to take much traditional career risk to do it.

That is probably one of the clearest benefits of the MBA for me. I could keep building my existing career while getting exposure to an entirely different set of frameworks, people, and industries.

Some of the outcomes I hoped for did not happen

I also went in hoping the program might help me scale Oat Productivity. That did not happen the way I wanted it to.

I learned things that were useful to the business, and I had access to people who could give me thoughtful feedback. But an MBA does not create product-market fit for you. It does not make distribution easier. It does not turn a side project into a company just because you now know more about business.

That is obvious in retrospect, but I think it is worth saying. Business school gives you tools and access. It does not remove the hard parts.

The network is real. Its value is harder to measure.

I definitely leave Haas with a network I did not have before. There are people I can call in venture, consulting, finance, startups, product, engineering, and a bunch of industries I had barely interacted with before.

That has value. How much value is much harder to answer.

The traditional MBA story assumes a reasonably liquid job market. You go to school, expand your network, add a credential, and use those things to pivot industries or functions.

The current market makes that much less straightforward. People I know trying to enter consulting or venture from the bottom are having a difficult time. Friends pursuing search funds are finding that the path is much harder in practice than it can look in a classroom or in a case study.

A network can open doors. It cannot make a company hire.

It cannot create a venture role that does not exist. It cannot make an acquisition target pencil out. That has made me more skeptical of very clean MBA ROI calculations.

The alumni access may matter more over time

One thing I probably underrated before enrolling is how much of the value continues after graduation. I am no longer just paying for classes.

I have access to Berkeley and Haas resources, alumni, events, faculty, entrepreneurship programs, career infrastructure, and a large community of people who have gone through the same institution. I do not know exactly which of those things I will use five or ten years from now.

That is part of why I hesitate to judge the experience entirely on what happens immediately after graduation. Some educational experiences are consumed and finished.

This one feels more like joining an ecosystem. That is hard to price, but it is not nothing.

So was it worth it?

For me, yes. I do not regret doing it.

It was expensive. It was a lot of work. There were stretches where balancing school with the rest of my life was exhausting.

But I learned a lot. I met people I would not otherwise have met.

I got a structured community at a point in my life when I really wanted one. I became much more comfortable thinking about businesses outside the engineering lens I had spent most of my career using.

And I got to explore startups, investing, and other possible directions without having to abandon my existing career to do it. That does not mean I think everyone should get an MBA.

I actually think the value proposition is more personal now than it used to be. If the goal is simply to switch jobs, the market can make the degree feel much less powerful than the brochure suggests.

If the goal is learning, community, access, exploration, or giving yourself structured exposure to people and ideas you would not otherwise encounter, the calculation looks different. For me, that second set of things mattered a lot more than I expected. A month out, that is probably the best answer I have.