[rchaud]

The Guy Kawasaki quote is absurd when you consider that US startups bleed cash all the way up to and often well past their IPO. You best believe that the banks who are out there selling a fantastical vision of a startup's future profitability have MBAs in their team. They're the ones making the engineers' equity worth something.

[ska]

It's not so absurd - it doesn't imply you shouldn't have any MBA's, just that the ratio to engineers should be very small at this stage. Which isn't wrong in a tech startup.

Also, the banks don't really create value here, they preserve it if they can and in the best case help people not piss it away. All for a handsome percentage, but c'est la vie.