Experts & Amateurs: The 2 Types of People You’ll Meet at Business School

In my main line of work, I’ve done a lot of analytics, work with excel spreadsheets and number crunching. I have a lot of experience with fundraising, even helping to raise 50 million dollars for a start-up.

From my work in e-commerce, I’ve had a lot of exposure to the actual tactics and inner workings of online business. I’ve worked on everything from starting a website to building out the back end. I acquired different skill-sets, like search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Now, if you think most people at business school have my level of experience going in, you are unfortunately mistaken. With my active tech background, I definitely had more experience than most of my peers did coming in to business school.

Especially among the entrepreneur types, there’s a pretty big experience disparity. It’s pretty binary. Either you’ve previously gone out and did the whole start-up thing and you know what you’re doing, or you’re completely new to the whole process and are trying to learn about business operations, so you can later get into it.

Personally, a lot of the people I’ve talked with in entrepreneurship communities have been pretty amateurish in general. They have the ambition and personal motivation, but they don’t have the knowledge and background.

Being around people with less experience is exciting and cool because you get to help people, lay down some knowledge, and be a resource. But it’s also frustrating because you think you’re going to arrive at business school and find a lot of people with similar backgrounds who you can potentially start a business with.

The most qualified people in entrepreneurship are the people who come in to business school who already have ideas for businesses they want to start. As you go to business school, there’s this awkward matchmaking process where you’re sorting through your peers, trying to find people with similar ideas.

In the best case scenario, you’ll find someone with a related idea and you will get along together and go on to form the next great business. Unfortunately, having that significant portion of business school students with relatively little experience makes finding knowledgeable partners a bit more difficult.