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It seems to me that in hiring, no one will frown upon a PhD in business from a top school, and so given the choice of the PhD or of the MBA as a career stepping stone, I'll take the PhD, thank you very much
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<p>Oh yes, they definitely will frown upon it. If you don't believe me, I would advise you to talk to current business PhD students or program heads, and they will surely all tell you a PhD is a poor move if you want to enter industry. The very first question employers will think is, if you wanted to be a practitioner, why did you choose the path of an academic? That will inevitably open the door to further uncomfortable questions such as, perhaps you're now trying to get an industry job after you graduate because you simply weren't good enough to get an academic placement, which will make them wonder why they should now hire you. Then there is the persistent question that perhaps you are simply too theoretically minded and not sufficiently willing to get your hands dirty in the real world. </p>
<p>But of course the biggest problem of all is obviously that private-sector employers won't even give you the chance to answer these questions, but will instead make their own determination to simply not grant an interview in the first place. After all, since you said you wanted to work in VC, trust me, VC partners at the top firms (and there is little point in joining a mediocre VC firm) are constantly deluged with requests for interviews. Why should they spend time interviewing you when they can instead interview somebody else (i.e. an MBA student) who doesn't have those potential problems? </p>
<p>But even all of that is neither here nor there, because we haven't even discussed what I view as the biggest problem of all: whether you can actually hack the PhD lifestyle. As I said above, plenty of people who enter business PhD programs never finish, and a significant fraction of them won't even pass their qualifying exams. You actually have to enjoy reading and writing a lot of academic articles, and embarking on a lifestyle of research in order to have a chance at finishing. Nor is performing that research any guarantee: some people simply have the bad luck of choosing a research project that fails (i.e. can't get the data they need, or if they do, can't discover any important and statistically significant findings, or even if they do that, can't establish causation or otherwise can't inform theory), and so they can't graduate. And even those that do finish can take 7 years or more to do so. I see nothing to gain and simply a lot of unnecessary pain in joining a business PhD program if you don't actually enjoy the lifestyle of research. </p>
<p>Contrast that with the MBA which - at any reputable program - basically, everybody is going to graduate. As long as you put in a bare minimum of effort, you know you're going to graduate. Maybe not with top grades, but you will pass and you will graduate. You don't have the large fractions of MBA students who are unable to finish their programs the way you do with PhD students. </p>
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I can also see myself retiring from full time work so that I can take a position as a part-time lecturer at a university while potentially still doing some angel investing.
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<p>If you want to be a part-time lecturer, you don't need a PhD for that, because being a lecturer means you won't be doing research anyway. </p>
<p>Don't believe me? Then consider Bob Huggins, part-time lecturer at HBS and GP/founder of Highland Capital Partners. He doesn't have a PhD. The highest degree he has is a HBS MBA. </p>
<p>Biography</a> - Robert F. Higgins</p>
<p>Or consider Ray Gilmartin. He's actually not part-time, he's actually a full Professor at HBS. Again, he doesn't have a PhD in business. His highest degree is a Harvard MBA. Of course, it clearly didn't hurt that he was the former President, CEO and Chairman of Merck. </p>
<p>Biography</a> - Raymond V. Gilmartin</p>
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Going to Oxford for the MSc and working in banking or consulting in another country really isn't a bad idea if he wants to move into VC at some point or another, as it's something on a resume other people won't have and he can BS some line about having a greater understanding of European product deployment and development than a normal candidate.
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<p>I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, but I am comparing it to what his likely competition is going to be. Let's face it, the competition for spots at the top VC firms (and there is little point in joining a mediocre VC firm) is absolutely fierce, and is heavily dominated by MBA grads mostly from HBS and Stanford, and to some extent Wharton and MITSloan. It's hard for me to see how having a MSc from Oxford would provide an advantage over somebody with those other credentials. </p>
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If you enter as a PhD "track" student the curriculum you explore will be much different I gather, as research is going to be a heavy component, resulting in you receiving an education that is less applicable to work in industry than an MBA student.
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<p>Research isn't just a 'heavy' component, in fact, it is almost exclusively the component. That, and, like I said, reading and critiquing other people's papers, an activity which I also consider to be a part of research. </p>
<p>I agree with you that a PhD in business is less applicable - in fact far less applicable - than is an MBA if you want to be a practitioner. Researchers care about building theory and will spend their time - in fact, to an obsessive level- in trying to find out why something works the way it does, and which academic literature their research findings will inform. Practitioners don't really care why something works; all they really care about is finding something that works. And, truth be told, much (in fact, I would argue, the vast majority) of business academia is, ironically, not relevant to real-world business; a point that has also been made famously by numerous academics such as Jeffrey Pfeffer and Rakesh Khurana.</p>