Research that now proves my assertion: An IVY league degree(IIT or IIM) is not the ticket to startup success
I have written a lot about entrepreneurship and qualities of successful entrepreneurs in my earlier posts and based on my experience working with a lot of great people I concluded that a pedigree does not guarantee startup success. The most successful entrepreneurs have been underdogs who never got things easily in life and developed fierce tenacity and with just this one quality they are able to achieve greatness. Larry Ellison who founded Oracle and where I started my career is a great example of a total underdog who is one of the dominant forces in the tech Industry today. Larry still has my greatest respect for sheer intellect and tenacity in business. I remember an event very clearly back in 1995/96 when Oracle 8i was launched and Informix started positioning themselves as the game changer in the database world as they had just bought Michael Stonebraker’s Object Database company Illustra and announced to the world that Relational Databases were dead and that Object databases are the future. I was part of a technology team that was working on training Oracle’s Salesforce on how to position against Informix’s attack. Larry knew all along that change in the technology world is very slow (though people outside the industry perceive it as very fast) and bet that evolving Oracle to the object world as and when the market was ready was the right approach and people were not going to dump relational technology for object technology overnight. His way of defending against Informix’s attack was to simply change the compensation plan of the entire salesforce and double their incentive if they took out Informix in any of their deals. Oracle at that time had one of the best Enterprise software salesforce in the world and this one small change just motivated every single sales person to go and kill Informix. This type of tenacity is not taught in IVY league schools. We don’t hear a lot about Informix today 
This awesome post written by Vivek Wadhwa on TechCrunch today drives home this point:
Quote: ” An Ivy League degree may get you a job as an investment banker or VC, but it won’t increase your odds of becoming a successful entrepreneur.”
Read the entire post at TechCrunch titled Got degree envy? No worries, you can still make it big.
While I do agree with your view, I have 2 points
1. An Ivy league degree gives you the courage to experiment coz if u fail you always have the option of getting a job because of your pedigree and the huge alumni network of your institution.
2. A management degree ensures that you have some idea of business and how to think through a problem. That doesnt stop you from making mistakes but you will make lesser mistakes
Sandip Dev
October 29, 2010 at 1:09 am