I hate getting cold calls. So I avoid doing it to other people.
Yes that makes me less of a salesman. So be it.
Tangent: In India you can report unsolicited sales calls to a central (government) authority, where you can sign up to get on a "Do Not Disturb" list, and get any sales caller who ignores this fined, and eventually get his number disconnected etc.
The system isn't perfect, and there are some impressive hacks to bypass it, but the situation now is much better than before these regulations existed. Where one used to get multiple spammers a day, now weeks and months can go by before getting one (who I promptly report). My number must be on some shared "cranky idiot who hates cold callers" list, I almost never get these calls now.
A minister was interrupted in parliament while presenting the annual national budget (iirc) by someone who wanted to sell him a credit card(!), which led to this regulation.
And it is a godsend. Cold callers should all burn in hellfire (imo)
"I argue that you still shouldn't focus on programming skills (which was Paul Graham's suggestion), because other skills will probably help you more. "
You don't have much of an argument yet. You are just stating this as a conclusion and it still has nothing to do with the title of your post ("elite mba") and neither does it debunk PG's point (learn to hack as opposed to trying for an elite MBA)
": the idea of Silicon Valley has spread so far that it's now seen as the way for technology people to get rich. Hence, the industry is flooded with technology people. So, if there's type of startup 1), which focuses more on pure technical skill, and type of startup 2), which focuses more on social skills and deal-making ability, it's probably going to be a lot harder to make money doing type of startup 1), because there's so much more competition. Hence, the most successful people tend to be people like Sam Altman, who is a good programmer, but who also does "businessy" things that a lot of hackers wouldn't like, like doing deals with cell phone company executives."
All of which has nothing to do with an elite MBA. Does Sam Altman have an elite MBA? let's check
From Wikipedia
"Loopt was founded during Altman's sophomore year at Stanford University[2] where he studied computer science with a focus on security and machine learning. He helped build an autonomous helicopter navigation system."
Doesn't look like he was one of the people who would be happy taking business classes. Skills other than hacking may indeed be the future of becoming an X millionaire, but these hardly correlate to having "elite MBA" s which was what the first portion of your post was about (not to mention the title).
You ask,
"What you really want to look at is what things are causing people to become successful, right at this moment. How does technology stack up?"
Better than having and "elite MBA" The ability to write code and understand customers , much more so than having an "elite mba".
An "elite mba" probably helps you become a business consultant or something corporat-ey more than become an entrepreneur building multi million dollar startups, which was the point of the portion of PG's essay you extracted. You set out to debunk it and didn't do so at all.
Yes that makes me less of a salesman. So be it.
Tangent: In India you can report unsolicited sales calls to a central (government) authority, where you can sign up to get on a "Do Not Disturb" list, and get any sales caller who ignores this fined, and eventually get his number disconnected etc.
The system isn't perfect, and there are some impressive hacks to bypass it, but the situation now is much better than before these regulations existed. Where one used to get multiple spammers a day, now weeks and months can go by before getting one (who I promptly report). My number must be on some shared "cranky idiot who hates cold callers" list, I almost never get these calls now.
A minister was interrupted in parliament while presenting the annual national budget (iirc) by someone who wanted to sell him a credit card(!), which led to this regulation.
And it is a godsend. Cold callers should all burn in hellfire (imo)