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For a start-up entrepreneur, start-up capital is definitely important.  First, he has a great, new idea.  Next, he creates it, and finally he seeks a way to make sure the whole world can buy what he has to sell, be that product or online service.  How important is education for the leadership of a start-up?  That all depends on which leadership role each person plans to assume.  A visionary, like the late Steve Jobs, has so much charisma and personal power that he found formal higher education a bit disappointing.  He ultimately discovered that he did not need that in order to realize the things he imagined could exist in the world, and he was right.  But an engineer or an accountant would certainly need formal training in order to do their jobs.

So now comes the big question:  what is most important to a start-up?  Education, or funding?  And beyond that, where does raw experience factor in?  We tend to think that education and experience both play a role in a person’s ability to find sources of start-up capital.  Some lenders will look at education in making their decision, while others will be more impressed by the experience of the entrepreneur or team.  This graphic attempts to sort out the reality of the question in some detail: