Forget the Ivy League: Most valley CEOs went public

College Search & Selection
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And you may be even more surprised to find how even fewer have ties to any particular public school.</p>

<p>You talk about Kleiner Perkins, so let's talk about it. The full name is Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Of those 4 guys, 2 of them (Perkins and Caufield) are Harvard MBA's and Byers has a Stanford MBA. In fact, among the degrees of those 4 founders, only 2 public schools are represented: Brook Byers has a bachelor's from Georgia Tech and Frank Caufield has a bachelor's from West Point (which is obviously a highly atypical public school).</p>

<p>Now, when you look at the GP's of Kleiner, you will find a variety of schools (although Harvard and Stanford keep popping up). What I find rather disturbing is that not even once did I find Berkeley mentioned, not even once. Maybe I missed something and maybe one of those partners really did come from Berkeley.

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<p>Wow, I didn't realize this thread was all about Berkeley vs. privates, Sakky. Again, you should get your obsession checked -- or at least your facts:</p>

<p>YES, you did miss SOME THINGS. First of all on the partner list provided by KP on their website, Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, and Floyd Kamme, a partner emeritus and Silicon Valley luminary, earned either a PhD or a BS at Berkeley. More importantly, did you look and see the diversity of schools? Those who have MBAs are somewhat concentrated at Harvard/Stanford, but a random walk through this list shows not only Georgia Tech, University of Illinois, West Point, several foreign public universities, and a whole smattering of non-famous or Ivy League private schools. The big takeaway if you look at this list is that in spite of the hugely the clubby reputation of VCs the talent comes from a lot different fronts. Now the real issue here is that this is too small of a sample to mean much, but it certainly doesn't bear out your rather stilted conclusion.</p>

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But if not (and it looks like not), then that's just sad. Kleiner is arguably the premier VC firm in Silicon Valley if not the world, and Berkeley is a huge school that is local to Silicon Valley, and yet Berkeley can't even get one representative?

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<p>Well, in this you are flat out wrong, but the bigger issue is, why are you so obsessed about how Berkeley does?</p>

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why are you so obsessed about how Berkeley does?

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<p>IIRC, sakky's "obsession" (as you call it) with Cal is the simple fact that he is an alumnus of Cal and, at any rate, I think he's more "obsessed" not by how Cal "does" but how it "doesn't"... i.e. he has been a vocal Cal critic not for criticism's sake but to point out where it can (and should) improve... i figure he has every right to that opinion on at least two counts: 1) he's more qualified than your average guy to talk about Cal given the fact that he is an alumnus and 2) he's got more at stake as an alumnus when it comes to Cal's reputation than your average guy.</p>

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Well, while I stated that they were "brilliant" and some of the "best" in the business --> you'll note that I didn't say that this necessarily means that their performance is going to be the "best" or "brilliant" (hence bringing up the LTCM fiasco). </p>

<p>Sticking with LTCM for a moment, take a quick gander at that team which included Nobel Prize winners Myron Scholes (of Black Scholes fame) --> basically one of the "Godfathers" of derivatives / options theory... or LTCM co-founder Robert C. Merton --> now check out this guys CV: B.S. in Engineering from Columbia, PhD in Applied Math (started at Caltech and finished at MIT and went onto join MIT Sloan's faculty and is now a professor at HBS). I mean the point is that their "brilliance" / "intelligence" cannot be questioned... they simply are the best minds in the business... literally rocket scientists in many cases.

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As to their "performance", well, that's another story. I am generally skeptical about any person's ability to consistently beat the market

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<p>Well, I think that's the point. What's so great about being 'brilliant' if your performance, probabalistically speaking, can't beat the market? Why not just invest in an index fund then? There are plenty of brilliant people that, frankly, produce nothing of value. Heck, much of academia can be characterized that way. </p>

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. and its clear that smarter minds build better mousetraps.

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<p>Uh, but I think you conceded yourself that they're not building better mousetraps. Their mousetraps are not beating the market. I agree with you that that's hard to do, but that's the point. If you can't do it, then why are you getting paid to do it.</p>

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and judging by the amount of money that keeps getting raised by these guys, I'm not the only one who thinks so.

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<p>I don't doubt that these guys can and do raise giant sums of money. But I think that can be attributed to facets of behavioral finance/behavioral economics, i.e. all that Thaler and Kahneman stuff, which showed that investors are not really rational, and in particular, that investors are subject to strong herding behavior (Scharfstein & Stein 1990). As long as investors think that they will get high returns from alternative investments, they will continue to pour money into such investments regardless of whether they actually receive those returns. Like I've always said, there's a huge difference between actually producing a high quality financial product and making people think that you've produced a high quality financial product, especially by taking advantage of their psychological foibles. In some sense, you could say that the latter has to do with 'brilliance', although, again, I would prefer to call it a matter of 'cunning'. </p>

<p>But again, I would point out that overall returns of alternative investments do not beat the market after subtracting management fees (Kaplan & Schoar 2005), and in particular, that the highest returns distributions are consistently concentrated in certain funds, meaning that the vast majority of such alternative funds actually produce submarket returns. To all this, I have to say that this is a triumph of marketing over substance and will serve as rich fodder for the behavioral finance scholars to study.</p>

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First of all on the partner list provided by KP on their website, Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, and Floyd Kamme, a partner emeritus and Silicon Valley luminary, earned either a PhD or a BS at Berkeley. More importantly, did you look and see the diversity of schools?

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<p>I don't count Kvamme because, like you said, he is emereti and hence no longer active in the firm. </p>

<p>But fair enough, I did forget about Bill Joy. Like I said, I looked at the partner list very fast and I freely admitted that I may have missed something. Still, having one Berkeley grad in the current partner list doesn't exactly strengthen Berkeley's case that much. </p>

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Those who have MBAs are somewhat concentrated at Harvard/Stanford, but a random walk through this list shows not only Georgia Tech, University of Illinois, West Point, several foreign public universities, and a whole smattering of non-famous or Ivy League private schools. The big takeaway if you look at this list is that in spite of the hugely the clubby reputation of VCs the talent comes from a lot different fronts. Now the real issue here is that this is too small of a sample to mean much, but it certainly doesn't bear out your rather stilted conclusion.

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<p>Uh, I think it precisely proves my conclusion. You admitted yourself that you found a concentration of Harvard and Stanford grads. That's the point. Why don't you find a concentration of Berkeley grads (or the grads of any other US public schools for that matter)? After all, one would expect to find such a thing simply from a purely numerical standpoint - as there are far more Berkeley grads than there are Harvard or Stanford grads. My conclusion stands.</p>

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<p>Here's what I said:</p>

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But I think the larger point of the article is that there is actually a huge smattering of sources of talent.</p>

<p>....until you talk about VCs and then Stanford GSB and Harvard B-school have a high concentration.... but then again if you look at the partners at places like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, there are a fair number of Stanford/Harvardites, but it's not an overwhelming amount.

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<p>Here's what you said:</p>

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Uh, I think it precisely proves my conclusion. You admitted yourself that you found a concentration of Harvard and Stanford grads. That's the point. Why don't you find a concentration of Berkeley grads (or the grads of any other US public schools for that matter)? After all, one would expect to find such a thing simply from a purely numerical standpoint - as there are far more Berkeley grads than there are Harvard or Stanford grads. My conclusion stands.

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<p>Overlooking some people who went to the likes of Berkeley and Michigan indicates your tendentiousness. I am not saying there's no shred of truth to what you said -- I said that all along -- but you've oversimplified things. And you went on to make some strident claims when you had your facts wrong. I would dial down the stridency.</p>

<p>You can say that what I am arguing proves the points you are making, but that's a pretty cheap rhetorical trick which I notice you use a lot. My point is that beyond some concentration of Harvard and Stanford MBAs that one would expect given the reputation of VC firms, the large numbers of people coming from Berkeley, Michigan, other publics and from out of the country and from non-Ivy privates, is actually pretty interesting and supports the point of the article which is that there is a wide diversity of talent sources in Silicon Valley, even in storied VC firms which are reputed to be top-heavy with Harvard/Stanfordites.</p>

<p>The partner emeritus Berkeley grad mentioned at Kleiner is actually a huge luminary in Silicon Valley.</p>

<p>There are other VC firms that were founded by Berkeley people or have concentrations, etc. and a wide variety of folks from other schools.</p>

<p>And manifestly there are large numbers of Berkeley grads both among the "Silicon Valley" nobility CEO's and the like, and venture capitalists, and people like Sonsini who started a famous law firm that I don't have to name.</p>

<p>This article does one listing of them.</p>

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Overlooking some people who went to the likes of Berkeley and Michigan indicates your tendentiousness. I am not saying there's no shred of truth to what you said -- I said that all along -- but you've oversimplified things. And you went on to make some strident claims when you had your facts wrong. I would dial down the stridency

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<p>First off, don't tell me how to post. I don't tell you what you can and cannot say or how to say it. </p>

<p>Secondly, one would have to expect that there must be some Berkeley or Michigan grads out there. Given the huge numbers at both schools, there HAVE to be some who make it big. The real question is, do the numbers match up to the grads from places like Harvard or Stanford? Yes or no?</p>

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<p>Note the strident tone:</p>

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Now, when you look at the GP's of Kleiner, you will find a variety of schools (although Harvard and Stanford keep popping up). What I find rather disturbing is that not even once did I find Berkeley mentioned, not even once. Maybe I missed something and maybe one of those partners really did come from Berkeley. But if not (and it looks like not), then that's just sad. Kleiner is arguably the premier VC firm in Silicon Valley if not the world, and Berkeley is a huge school that is local to Silicon Valley, and yet Berkeley can't even get one representative?

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<p>Oops, it's wrong:</p>

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Secondly, one would have to expect that there must be some Berkeley or Michigan grads out there. Given the huge numbers at both schools, there HAVE to be some who make it big. The real question is, do the numbers match up to the grads from places like Harvard or Stanford? Yes or no?

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<p>If one looks at my posts above, one should be able to see my viewpoint on that. That's not the real question. The real thing that this article points out, I'll say it again, refers to the diversity of sources of talent in Silicon Valley</p>

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don't tell me how to post.

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<p>You can post however you want. And when you are inaccurate -- and obsessed with making particular points that apparently serve some emotional need and therefore drive you to say strident things or things that are flat out false -- I can well post something which sets the record straights and treats data in a way that comes to what I think are proper conclusions. Or at least is not stridently set up to itch some arcane scratch.</p>

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IIRC, sakky's "obsession" (as you call it) with Cal is the simple fact that he is an alumnus of Cal and, at any rate, I think he's more "obsessed" not by how Cal "does" but how it "doesn't"... i.e. he has been a vocal Cal critic not for criticism's sake but to point out where it can (and should) improve... i figure he has every right to that opinion on at least two counts: 1) he's more qualified than your average guy to talk about Cal given the fact that he is an alumnus and 2) he's got more at stake as an alumnus when it comes to Cal's reputation than your average guy.

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<p>But Sakky's posts are tendentiously set out to deride Cal, and in cases where he is simply inaccurate, he can expect me to call him out on it. His posts are manifestly dedicated to running Cal down, whatever he may claim. That's of course his right. It's my right to say he's being ridiculous or overstating things too.</p>

<p>Look at the underlying article. Behind Stanford, Berkeley provides an overwhelming number of CEOs to Silicon Valley firms and has produced significant founders (Intel: Gordon Moore, Apple: Steve Wozniak, Sun: Bill Joy). If one is claiming that is a record of non-performance, one is not paying attention.</p>