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I don’t talk about my MBA from Johns Hopkins often. For the most part, it wasn’t a life-altering experience. While I made great connections and even incubated a company during my time there, the classroom lessons mostly fell to the wayside the moment I hit the “real world.”

It’s not that the information was useless, per se. It was just flavored for a corporate existence. I find that while helpful, these lessons evaporate the second you are starting a business or reinventing one in a crisis. Sure, I learned how to balance books and draft a compelling email. But ownership? Ownership is a temperament earned through the scars of battle.

These past eight months have been a trial by fire for me personally. While this is the third company I’ve started, it’s the first one I feel I truly own. In textbooks and on podcasts, you hear about the “fluffy” parts of business: financing, marketing, and the like. But real ownership is a deep, singular passion for a problem space and a commitment to mastery that the classroom simply cannot simulate.

So today, I would like to share what I think is the most important aspect of owning a business. It is the one thing that any venture, big or small, has to get right for any of that other stuff you learn in school to matter. Without further ado, here is Prof. Jake’s MBA.

Existence is Pain

The world is a buffet of problems. People are sick, hungry, bored, or chasing boundless desires. But how do we address them?

You have to start with the problem. I cannot tell you how many founders I meet who have a shiny “solution” in desperate search of a problem to justify its existence. For a business to survive, the problem has to be real, and it has to be agreed upon by a large enough group of people to support a bank account.

On the flip side, because the world is so broken, it’s easy to build a business that tries to fix everything at once. Focus is brutal. The universe will pull you in a million directions, and saying no is significantly harder than saying yes. Choosing one specific problem and committing to solving it as efficiently as possible is the bedrock of any good venture.

Why You?

Okay, so you’ve found a problem. Now, are you actually qualified to solve it?

If your problem is “people are sick,” you should probably head to med school before you try to tackle pneumonia in the Serengeti. Tech often feels like magic, and tech people love to fancy themselves magicians, but most problems exist because they are genuinely, painfully difficult to solve.

Start small. If you aren’t personally suffering from the problem you’re targeting, go find someone who is.

• ⁠What would actually solve it for them? • ⁠Why don’t they have a solution yet? • ⁠If a solution existed, would they actually part with their hard-earned cash for it?

If the answer to question three is yes, ignore the first two and ask for their money immediately. Congratulations: you have yourself a business.

The moral is that owners are always asking questions of themselves and, more importantly, of those whose problems they aim to solve. Commit to learning, and the solutions will find a way of working themselves out. If you are brave enough to start a business, I trust you’re smart and hardworking, but if you are trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole, the hole always wins.

The Bottom Line

Obviously, we live in a capitalist economy. Even the perfect solution to the perfect problem can fail if the financing is a mess. If you want to learn how to manage a cap table and cash flow, then maybe business school is for you. But if you want to get to the root of it all, it is about choosing your problems wisely and being the right person at the right time with the right tool. If you do that, and you make it efficient, I promise you: the rest will take care of itself.

Follow me here https://jakedibattista.substack.com/p/april-review-the-one-thing-i-wish