No plan, no MBA, and what the line leaves out
The formal apparatus of starting a company matters less than it used to. The idea matters less than the line suggests, too.
You don’t need a business plan. You don’t need to have an MBA. All you need is a great idea. Anything is possible and you can accomplish it.
Two of the three claims here are well supported by how startups are now funded. Ron Conway is one of the most active angel investors in Silicon Valley, an early backer of Google and many companies since, and investors like him rarely read business plans. Seed programs such as Y Combinator ask for a short application, a working prototype if possible and a conversation. A thirty-page plan with five years of projected revenue is mostly fiction for a company with no customers, and investors know it.
The MBA point holds too. Many of the best-known software companies of the past fifteen years were started by people with no business degree, often by programmers who left college early. The skills that matter first, building a product and persuading people to use it, are learned by doing.
The third claim is the weak one. A great idea is rarely enough, and it is not what Conway and investors like him are actually buying. At the seed stage they look at the founders: whether they can build, how fast they move, whether they learn from users and whether they will keep going when things go wrong. The same idea in two different teams produces two very different companies, and plenty of great ideas die because nobody executes them well.
The line also fits only one kind of company. A software startup can test an idea for a few thousand dollars and learn more in a month than any plan could predict. A restaurant, a factory or a store that needs a bank loan is different. Lenders require a plan, and they are right to, because the founder is committing large sums before the first customer arrives. For those businesses, writing the plan is how the founder finds out whether the numbers work at all.
The last sentence is encouragement rather than analysis. It is meant to get people started, and for a reader who is hesitating that may be its most useful part. A founder should take the permission and leave the promise.