Never Too Old to Count the Half-Years: What My MBA at 62 Taught Me
I've spent twenty years as CEO of a tech company, and before that, I ran another one. I don't need an MBA to get promoted, land a better job, or pad my income. So why, at 62 and a half — and yes, I'm counting the half, because you're never too old to count the half-years — did I just finish one?
Because it had been sitting on my bucket list for four decades, and this was finally the year the timing, the cost, and the format all lined up.
The One That Got Away, Four Times
This wasn't my first attempt. Over the years, I applied to and was accepted into MBA programs at UVA, Georgetown, George Mason, and Pepperdine. Every single time, life got in the way. Sometimes it was work. Sometimes it was family and kids. Sometimes it was just the plain math of the thing: a $100,000-$150,000 price tag, stacked on top of the income I'd lose while not working, made the ROI impossible to justify. I could look at the numbers and know exactly why I wasn't doing it.
Quantic School of Business and Technology changed that math entirely. It costs roughly a quarter to an eighth of what those traditional programs run and because it's built to be done from your phone on your own schedule, I never had to stop working to pursue it. For the first time in forty years, the equation finally aligned.
What Surprised Me About Going Back at 62
What I didn't expect was that doing an MBA in your 60s, after running businesses for two decades, is a completely different experience than doing it in your 20s, 30s, or 40s. Instead of checking a box for a promotion, I was here because of curiosity, which turns out to be a much better teacher than ambition.
Every course, quiz, and exam became a kind of mirror. I could see clearly what I already knew about, what bored me, and what genuinely lit me up — and I could apply almost all of it immediately, because I was learning it against twenty years of decisions I'd actually made.
The ironic part is what showed up on each side of that line. Forty years ago in college, I made straight A's in accounting, statistics, and math. This time around, those were the subjects I found least interesting — I'd lived them long enough that the theory had nothing left to teach me. Meanwhile, the classes where I'd pulled B's back then — communications, negotiation, finance (especially M&A and venture capital), and AI, which wasn't even a subject you could study in the 1980s — were the ones I couldn't get enough of. Running a company for two decades apparently reshuffles what you're hungry to learn.
Studying Like It's Social Media (and Why That's Not a Bad Thing)
I do miss the classroom. There's something I still miss about being physically present with classmates and sitting in a lecture hall, which no phone screen can replicate. But I understand now why Quantic is going to keep pulling in the younger generation, because the experience of studying on it feels a lot like scrolling social media: a lot of swiping, navigating with your thumb, lessons that are informal and genuinely funny, with some imagery to keep you engaged.
Don't mistake that for a lack of rigor, though. It's still a serious MBA underneath that mobile-first shell. And that shell happens to be ideal if you've got ADHD or a packed schedule. The lessons run about five minutes, which is exactly long enough to knock one out while you're waiting for a meeting to start, sitting in a doctor's office, or killing time at an airport gate. I also got to take courses that simply didn't exist when I got my undergraduate degree, like managing software development and how to introduce AI into your organization — material that's directly useful to where Agileana is headed, not abstract history.
The Part Where I Got to Actually Go Places
One of the best surprises was the global meetups. Quantic brings together students from your cohort along with people ahead of you, behind you, and already graduated, and these happen in cities around the world. I made it to ones in London and Vancouver. It's a strange and interesting kind of travel: not exactly a business trip and not quite a vacation, but still a reason to go somewhere and finally shake hands with people you'd only ever known through a Slack channel.
Where It Falls Short
I'd be doing readers a disservice if I didn't mention the rough edges. Some lessons link out to web pages that no longer exist. And on a handful of quiz and exam questions, the "correct" answer was wrong or misleading, based on my forty years of actually running tech businesses and working in an agile environment. If you don't have that experience to check it against, you'd have no way of knowing the answer key was off, you'd just take it as given. There's real room for improvement there.
Would I Recommend It
Yes, it's honest about what it is: an affordable, convenient, genuinely practical MBA that respects the fact that adults have jobs, families, and no interest in taking on six figures of debt to get a piece of paper. I'm already planning to bring what I learned back to my team at Agileana, to help shape where we go next as a company, and, as I head into what I think of as the final quarter of my own life, to help shape where I go next too.