If you are not checking the Longreads Web site regularly, you should be—Longreads combs the Internet for the best long-form writing, thereby saving you significant research time while bringing you fascinating stories. Longreads recently selected what it considers the best business writing of 2014 and chose an article from Wired magazine in April: “One Startup’s Struggle Survive the Silicon Valley Gold Rush.” Wired tells the story of Boomtrain, a seemingly doomed start-up whose founders are in a state of perpetual anxiety, striving to keep a few small pieces of their business together by bringing enough angel investors on board to make payroll. Boomtrain is led by Harvard Business School (HBS) graduate Nick Edwards, but HBS is a mere footnote in the story. In fact, the only degree that anyone seems to care about is that of Tevye Krynski, who holds a PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is thus a bankable/marketable software engineer.
What is fascinating about the Wired article is that it recasts Silicon Valley as a place not where billionaires are born every minute, but where dreams are dashed each second. It shows just how many Boomtrains are out there and how challenging the fund-raising environment can be. And—relevant to our audience—although an HBS MBA is certainly not a liability in Silicon Valley, it does not seem to be the ticket to Easy Street that many believe it is.
The Wired article is well worth reading for any would-be MBA entrepreneur but also for anyone interested in a riveting article about the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. We will leave the ending for you to discover yourself…