VCs Still Like MBAs — but What They Really Want Are Operators

The MBA-to-VC pipeline is not broken, but it is bending.

The top programs still funnel graduates into venture capital, but firms are increasingly focused on funding candidates with technical depth and operating experience as the industry reorients itself around AI, frontier hardware, climate tech, and healthcare platforms.

Why MBAs Still Matter in Venture Capital Today

Business school pedigrees continue to be the industry’s best passports to its front door. Harvard sent around 50 of its approximately 1,000 MBA graduates into VC in 2024 with a median starting salary just shy of $177,500, according to school employment reports and PitchBook data. Stanford put some 30 students from a smaller class. PitchBook also tallies over 10,000 Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton MBA alumni in senior positions inside U.S. VC firms.

Their numbers speak to lasting advantages: formal training in finance and governance, a robust alumni network, and access to a vetted pipeline of startups. MBAs still tick every box for roles in investor relations, fund strategy, and portfolio support.

Why the Center of Gravity in Venture Is Shifting

The person who makes a good investor is taking on new dimensions. Stanford’s Ilya Strebulaev has discovered that MBAs made up approximately 44% of midcareer VC professionals in the early 2000s, compared to about 32% now. The decline reflects the ascension of sectors in which technical literacy and company-building scar tissue count for more than case studies.

AI is the clearest example. At some investment teams, simply knowing how model architectures work, what a data flywheel is, and the economics of compute is becoming table stakes. PitchBook and NVCA data indicate that AI deals are taking a bigger bite of U.S. venture dollars over the past two years, in line with the deep tech and hard-tech categories making up a higher share. Companies are hiring from OpenAI, NVIDIA, SpaceX, and the best model labs today in part due to the reality that diligence increasingly means evaluating code (often walls of it), GPUs, supply chains — not just TAM slides.

Executive recruiters echo the pivot. As one veteran headhunter described for PitchBook, the hunger for cookie-cutter traditional MBA pedigrees has cooled at the margin when a role demands comfort with numbers or on-the-ground company building. Funds like Lux Capital, DCVC, Eclipse, and a16z’s sector practices demonstrate an expanding bench of partners and principals that were engineers, researchers, or repeat operators before they became investors.

Résumés Most Likely to Get Callbacks from VC Firms

Trends are beginning to appear in who gets hired:

• Former founders with a zero-to-one build, even if it was not strong. Being able to get in, ship, and accelerate directly applies to portfolio work.
• Product leaders and staff engineers from category leaders—Databricks, Snowflake, Stripe, Anthropic—who can pressure-test technical moats and GTM design.
• AI, robotics, bio, and climate researchers with publication or patent trails, frequently across a background of commercializing tech inside startups.
• Go-to-market operators in security, data infrastructure, and vertical SaaS who “grew up” learning enterprise sales cycles and unit economics inside and out.

How Data Teams Are Reshaping Venture Sourcing and Diligence

Many firms are also building internal data teams. The job is part scout, part quant—mining cap tables, GitHub activity, hiring graphs, and usage telemetry to spot momentum earlier and augment traditional partner networks.

Implications for MBA Programs and Students Today

Students are still flocking to the path—Stanford’s VC club reportedly counts hundreds of members within its MBA cohort—and they are paying real money to do it. A two-year degree at a top school can cost well over $200,000, excluding opportunity cost.

Programs are adapting:

• Joint degrees in engineering, data science, and bio
• Operator-in-residence tracks
• Venture labs spread across schools

The graduates breaking into VC increasingly pair the MBA with tangible artifacts—open-source contributions, prototype builds, scout investing track records, or stints in product roles at venture-backed startups.

For candidates, the takeaway is practical: if you pursue an MBA, stack it with real operating reps or technical proof points. Scout programs from large firms, angel checks via syndicates, or internships inside portfolio companies create a signal that classroom learning alone cannot.

How Firms Are Rewriting Their Venture Hiring Playbooks

Generalist funds are adding sector specialists, operators-in-residence, and platform leaders who can help portfolio companies with hiring, pricing, and compliance.

Frontier-focused firms continue to prioritize technologists who can underwrite risk in regulated or capital-intensive arenas like defense, semiconductors, and synthetic biology.

The end state is not binary. MBAs still matter for governance, capital formation, and scaling. But the marginal hire in 2024 and beyond is far more likely going to be someone who has built or shipped something hard — and can sit across from a founder and debug a model, architect a supply chain, or design a sales motion. In a world where speed and knowledge determine allocation, that’s the edge firms are purchasing.