Good question, and it's a personal decision as to what a person believes their best path is.

Speaking as someone who has co-founded a successful company (Wombat Security Technologies, over a thousand customers for our security training software), I really didn't know what I didn't know. As an undergrad and a PhD student in CS, I learned tons about graphics, distributed systems, hardware, algorithms, and so on. But that didn't prepare me to read balance sheets, understand how to do a good competitive analysis, know how to manage people, know the best methods for rapidly prototyping and validating ideas, how to do sales and marketing and (more importantly) how to measure it, and so on.

Just on this last point, like most techies, I originally had a negative view of sales and marketing. I never realized how hard it was, how good you have to be at it, and that it can actually be measured in useful ways. If you're lucky enough to be part of a good team that can teach you these and other skills, that's really fantastic.

Now, our Master's of Product Management won't teach you all of the skills above, but it covers many of them. It also does it in a safe space where it's ok to try out ideas, take risks, and fail. You can do it without having to worry about making payroll (though of course there is tuition), or having to find space to lease, or figuring out founder's pies, or worrying about lots of other logistics and paperwork.

That is, at a startup, you are focused solely on one thing: survival. You don't have a lot of time for reflection, for deep thinking, for understanding what are best practices backed by lots of empirical evidence. Like I had when doing my startup, you might also have a narrow view of things because you simply don't know what you don't know. You don't know what other options are possible. And making too many mistakes can be fatal for a startup, resulting in bad feelings from your co-founders and funders.

Now obviously no single master's program can address all of that, or even guarantee success. These are just very different paths for learning, with lots of different goals and tradeoffs.

It's also worth pointing out that startups are not for everyone. Some people might be at a large company and want to make a career change, but still want to stay at a large company. Again, different goals and different tradeoffs.

Thanks for the reply. I definitely agree on many of the points you mentioned. I wanted to pose the question for the HN community because there is probably a slightly stronger negative bias towards this technique of gaining experience.

I definitely look forward to hearing about the experience of this class after its first one or two semesters.

I imagine this is intended for large companies that have hundreds or thousands of employees. Product manager is a specialized role that incorporates strategy and business development. I'm sure startup experience would be great too, but this is different. Product Management often targets projects with multi-year contracts whose lifetime span careers.