Yes, but in the context of the original question, which was

Is MBA important for a programmer to start a Tech Company?

the value of an MBA as a gateway to a Big Company job is not particularly helpful :)

what many people don't realize about an MBA is the fact that it's a gateway into certain big-company jobs (e.g., those in select Wall Street firms) ... the degree and school name are what people pay for. obviously, they can always learn the technical material from books or even online.

this post is basically like one that's claiming "I'll save you the time of getting a driver's license" and simply telling you the local driving rules ... the LICENSE itself is what people need to get if they want to legally drive. an MBA is a 'license' to work in certain types of firms (probably those that HNers probably don't want to work at)

Some damage to one's reputation is an occupational hazard of doing disreputable things.

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/disreputa...

From: http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html

Twitter is important because it’s a new protocol. Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients. It’s really more of a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely.

We could try to draw a small excerpt of this 'periodic table':

              LONG    SHORT
  ONE:ONE     email   im/sms
  ONE:PUBLIC  blogs   twitter

Of course, the axes aren't exact. You can write arbitrarily short emails and blogposts, and lengthy IMs. Twitter is usually 'public' but only viewed by some set of friends/acquaintances/fans, and interactions range from chatty conversations to long lagged correspondences. Each box bleeds into the others with crossover communications.

But you get the idea; the signature modes of each big success are variations on a theme, nailing a new permutation. And it shouldn't be surprising that blogging pioneers happened upon the adjacent twitter opportunity at the right time.

You could build similar tables where an axis-of-contrast is EPHEMERAL/ARCHIVED, or BUSINESS/PLEASURE, or TEXT/AUDIOVISUAL, or REALTIME/TIME-LAGGED, or SIMPLE/POWERFUL, and see some of the same things appear in the quadrants, or other familiar services, or gaping holes -- where there may be Twitter-sized opportunity waiting.

One other thing to keep in mind in this debate is that it's expensive to defend yourself from a patent lawsuit. For example, this blog (http://rpxcorp.com/blog/?p=129), whose accuracy I have no idea of, claims that the average total cost of a patent lawsuit where the potential damages are under $25MM is $3.1MM to defend yourself, and $6.2MM if the potential damages are over that number.

So there are several parts to this equation. 1) Creating any bit of software involves thousands of "inventions," any one of which could be patentable. 2) Patents are granted for things which fail the obviousness test, where the chance of someone else independently "inventing" the same thing is essentially 100%. 3) The damages for violating even one patent tend to be astronomical and totally out of line with the contribution of that "invention" to the software in question. Out of 2 million lines of code, if one total BS patent covers 20 lines of that code, why are the damages likely to be basically equivalent to most of the revenue for that product? 4) The cost of defending against a patent lawsuit is enormous.

In other words: if you're a small software business, then there's pretty much a 100% chance someone else can sue you for patent infringement if they want to, losing the case will kill your company, and trying to defend yourself will severely drain your resources and could kill your company anyway.

There's no part of that that helps or encourages innovation.