Professor at Stanford | Bestselling Author | Innovation | Venture Capital & Private Equity
Which schools are more likely to produce unicorn founders? Business school graduates are more likely than ever to start companies. For the sample of 531 U.S. unicorns, my team at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business Venture Capital Initiative and I carefully identified 1,356 founders (not an easy task!). Out of these, 238 founders earned a business school graduate degree, with 25 business schools having at least two founders among their alumni. For each business school, we then estimated the total number of full-time MBA graduates between 2000 and 2015. The ratio of total graduates over unicorn founders is the “per capita” unicorn founder production of each business school, which eliminates the bias caused by the unequal size of the school’s classes (e.g., Harvard Business School is twice as large as Stanford University Graduate School of Business). The Stanford University Graduate School of Business is ahead with 3 unicorn founders per 1,000 MBA alumni, with Harvard Business School second at 1.6, and University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business third at 1.4. The chart shows the US business schools ranked accordingly. #startups #unicorns #venturecapital #businessschools #MBA
Thanks for your posts Ilya, i find them very interesting. I think this one is mostly correlation, though and I'm not sure what question it's trying to answer. I'd be personally interested in the number of VCs coming out of those schools. Is there something like "Stanford VCs fund Stanford founder" kind of thing. Incrementality is another one. If a current unicorn founder from Stanford went to Kellogg, would it be any different? Not sure how you would dive into this, though 😅
Ilya Strebulaev Very interesting! and proud as one of Haas alumni (although I am not an entrepreneur). I checked the # of unicorns from YC and found 25 out of 3,234, which is 0.77%. If we consider ratio of entrepreneurs at each school, it seems that top business school founders are more likely to produce unicorns than YC founders. For example, if 10% of Haas students start their own companies, the probability of Haas entrepreneurs will be unicorn founders is 1.4% (>0.77%). Does this sound too good to be true? Or I am making some errors in assumptions or calculations. I would appreciate your thought! Thank you again for the great work.
Inspiring and impressive!
Ilya Strebulaev Great research! Can you share the data behind the graph please? I would love to take a look
Nice to see USC Marshall in a great place on such an impressive list! Thank you for sharing.
If you can afford to attend those top 3 schools you probably have a higher chance of having the resources to start a business lol. Causation does not equal Correalation.
WOHOO Berkeley!
Just imagine the scope if GSB opened the classroom to the world and more founders had access
Business Mentor & External Lecturer | DBA Researcher in Digital Transformation & Business Model Innovation | Bridging Academia and Practice
3yEls Duran