I have a PhD in Business. I spent years writing about strategy, organizational behaviour, and the kinds of decisions founders make under uncertainty. Then I started a studio, and for the first eighteen months almost nothing the doctorate gave me felt directly applicable.
This is not a complaint. It is just a useful thing to say out loud. Most of the founders I work with who are considering an MBA or a PhD ask me the same question: was it worth it. The honest answer is yes, but for reasons that have very little to do with the things I expected.
Here is what I actually use, a few years into operating.
What the doctorate gave me that I use weekly.
The discipline of saying "I don't know" in writing. A PhD trains you, mostly through being publicly humiliated by reviewers, to admit the limits of what you can claim. Founders are pushed in the opposite direction — to project confidence about things they cannot possibly know yet. The doctorate gave me a vocabulary for talking to a customer or an investor about a thing I am uncertain about without lying and without losing the room. That vocabulary is the single most useful thing I brought into the operating chair.
The habit of reading the original source. Most strategy advice in the startup ecosystem is a third-generation summary of someone's summary of a paper from 1995. The PhD taught me to go find the 1995 paper. It is sometimes worse than the summary. More often it is much better, and it contains the part the summarizer didn't understand. When I am helping a founder think through pricing, or hiring, or unit economics, I am almost always pulling from the primary source — not because I am being academic, but because the primary source has nuance the summary lost.
The willingness to write something that nobody wants to read. A doctoral dissertation is an exercise in writing forty thousand words that maybe nine people will read. After that, writing a thirty-page business plan that an immigration officer will read once feels manageable. The endurance is real, and it transfers.
What the doctorate gave me that I had to unlearn.
Strategy as a noun. The academic literature treats strategy as a thing — a plan, a position, a portfolio. In the operating chair, strategy is much more obviously a verb. It is the act of allocating this week's hours and this quarter's hires and this year's product roadmap. There is no document called "the strategy." There is only the sequence of allocations. Watching a founder mistake the slide deck for the strategy is a thing I see every week now. I made the same mistake for the first six months of my own studio.
Frameworks as truth. Porter, Mintzberg, Christensen — I taught these. They are useful, but they are tools, not truths. The academy rewards finding the situation that fits the framework. Operating rewards the opposite: ignoring the framework when the situation does not fit it. Most of the most expensive mistakes I see founders make are made by very smart people running a perfectly correct framework on a situation that was actually about something else.
Models that assume rational actors. Most strategy models assume the people making decisions have decent information, decent preferences, and roughly stable beliefs. In a real venture, none of those is true most of the time. The customers don't know what they want until they see it. The team has private information the founder doesn't. The founder is sleep-deprived and angry on Tuesday and giddy on Wednesday. Models that don't have room for this are not wrong; they are just not aimed at this season of the work.
What I expected the doctorate to give me, and it didn't.
A clear view of which businesses are good ideas. I assumed, when I started writing business plans for other founders, that I would have a better-than-average ability to call which ventures would work. I was wrong. The ventures I have been most confident about have a roughly even hit rate with the ventures I have been least confident about. The doctorate did not give me a predictive model for new business success. Nobody has one. I am suspicious of anyone who claims they do.
Authority. This one is mostly a personal lesson. I assumed the PhD would carry some weight in client conversations, especially with non-technical founders. It does, in a brief sense — for the first ten minutes of a first meeting. After that, what carries weight is whether the next thing I say is useful. The credentials get me in the room. The work keeps me there. The number of times I have leaned on the credential to close a hard conversation is zero.
What I think the doctorate is actually worth for a founder.
For most founders, an MBA or a PhD is not the high-leverage move. The high-leverage move is shipping the smallest useful version of the venture, watching it land, and adjusting. The classroom takes years; the market answers in weeks.
The credentials get me in the room. The work keeps me there.
But for some founders — especially those building businesses that touch a regulated industry, or businesses that require their founder to be the source of authority on a hard problem — the doctorate is not nothing. It buys credibility with specific audiences (regulators, investors with academic backgrounds, certain enterprise customers). It buys habits of mind that are hard to acquire on the job. And it buys the right to write a document that gets read seriously, because the writer is, by training, a person who reads.
I would do it again. I would do it for different reasons than the reasons I started it.
If you are thinking about a graduate degree as a founder and you want a candid take from someone who finished one and runs a studio, write to info@startpro.ca. We do thirty-minute conversations like this most weeks. It is some of the work I enjoy most, because the conversation is more useful than the answer.
— K.