Interesting data of where startup founders went for undergrad.

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Crunchbase had an article of where startup founders went to college:
<a href="http://info.crunchbase.com/2013/08/entrepreneurs-and-universities/"&gt;http://info.crunchbase.com/2013/08/entrepreneurs-and-universities/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Unfortunately, they scrunch all degree types together (grad, undergrad, b-school, etc.), so Stanford and Harvard lead everyone, but I'd expect them to with their powerful b-schools and Stanford's prolific grad programs.</p>

<p>A more interesting question is where startup founders went for undergrad. Well, they have a dataset there, so I played with it, and excluding the grad schools, here is what I came up with for North American colleges (among the rest of the world, only some Israeli and maybe some Indian) ones would have made it in to the list, BTW):</p>

<p>All majors (minimum of 10):
Stanford: 92
Cal: 72
Harvard: 63
MIT: 54
UPenn: 48
Cornell, Yale: 40
Illinois: 34
USC: 33
UMich: 32
Columbia: 29
Brown: 25
Princeton: 23
Duke: 22
UT-Austin: 21
CMU: 20
UCLA: 18
NYU: 16
UDub: 15
Dartmouth, McGill: 14
UCSD, Georgetown, Maryland: 13
UW-Madison, Babson: 12
UVa, Syracuse: 11
Northwestern, Cal Poly SLO, RPI, Santa Clara, UChicago, UColorado, UFlorida, UNC-CH: 10</p>

<p>Notable: CalTech does not make the list (neither do JHU, Rice, WashU, & Vanderbilt).</p>

<p>CS only (minimum of 5)
Stanford: 36
MIT: 25
Illinois, Cal: 18
Harvard: 15
Cornell: 12
UPenn: 9
UMich, CMU, Columbia: 8
Maryland, Syracuse: 7
UT-Austin, Duke, Iowa: 5</p>

<p>Notable: UIUC CS and Cal CS (undergraduate) have almost as many startup founders as alums as the entire alumni base of Princeton/Duke/CMU (and more than Dartmouth/CalTech/UChicago/JHU/RiceWashU/Vandy)</p>

2

<p>What is their definition of a “start up”? I couldn’t find it anywhere.</p>

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<p>PurpleTitan, you might want to check how you recounting these numbers for CS. For example, I counted 7 for UCSD in CS, Math/Computer Science, EECS, Computer Engineering, CSE, Computer Science. I think the spreadsheet has many different variations, but the above would be considered CS/Engineering to me.</p>

4

<p>It’s interesting data, but does it tell us anything? Clearly people who go to Stanford and start companies are smart, and Stanford being the best school in close proximity to Silicon Valley makes difference, but is Stanford causing this or is it merely the beneficiary? I suspect Stanford’s access to SV and its alumni network increase anyone’s odds, but 92 people out of how many years is hardly a guarantee of success that I’d be willing to bet the bank on.</p>

5

<p>It’s so easy to create a start-up these days that it’s almost a meaningless term. </p>

6

<p>@DrGoogle:</p>

<p>Well, I didn’t count CE or EE (software-only, so CS or software engineering or IS; idiosyncratic, I know, but that’s how I started the list and I didn’t want to redo it half-way through). I also didn’t count masters or PhDs.</p>

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<p>I didn’t count masters or PhDs , I didn’t count EE either, but I thought some of these majors are so similar, it could be somebody miswrote something.</p>

8

<p>This is a bit surprising.</p>

<p>Then again Cal Tech and JHU continuously ranked among the most stressed student in the country. No wonder the are out of fire for any innovation when they graduate… perhaps changing fields to something employable.
The Stanford factor is worthy of a second look. The school proximity to Silicon is arguably a strong factor, but the same can be said about Cal Tech, but NO SHOW.
It would be nice to see further research and a more detailed analysis on this subject.</p>

9

<p>Caltech is awfully tiny, so it doesn’t have a big pool of students to start businesses.</p>

10

<p>Amount of students vs amount of students who made a company doesn’t matter imo because all you need to do is submit a paper for a few hundred dollars, whether they succeeded is the problem. Stanford has many student programs for those who consider starting up in silicon valley and are quite supportive about it so the numbers do make sense.</p>

11

<p>Not only is Catech very tiny, but its alumni have the highest per capita rate of PhD completions of any college. The startup numbers may be influenced by interests and choices that have little to do with the academic quality of these schools. In my opinion, PhD production is a better indicator of academic quality than alumni startups (although it, too, must be heavily influenced by personal choices.)</p>

12

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<p>This is self-reported data, which has a tendency toward regional/market bias. It’s also limited to technology companies, which is a subset of all start-ups. </p>

13

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<p>Yes, without comparing it to the size of the student body, this data doesn’t mean a ton to me. I’d like to see it as a % of grads somehow. Ah… and only tech startups, well there certainly are a lot of other kinds of new companies, too.</p>

14

<p>Stanford professors sometimes start these companies but let the students own it. I got called multiple times for jobs that were started by Stanford professors but they don’t want to run it.</p>

15

<p>

92 is just the tip of the iceberg. To pass Stanford’s class Entrepreneurial Engineer class EE203, students need to identify and describe a Stanford startup that is not on their current list, so over time the list gets larger and larger. The 2012 list at <a href=“https://sites.google.com/site/ee203class/home/company-list”>https://sites.google.com/site/ee203class/home/company-list&lt;/a&gt; shows over 1000 Stanford companies, which includes ones founded by grad students. I expect that even this list of over 1000 is only a small fraction of the actual total. And I’m sure the rate of startups has increased quite a bit since 2012 due to new Stanford-specific support networks and incubators like <a href=“http://startx.stanford.edu/”>http://startx.stanford.edu/&lt;/a&gt; making the process more simple, a tremendous increase in CS majors (CS is by far the most popular major at Stanford), a better economic environment for creating startups, etc.</p>

16

<p>It makes sense that smart people have good ideas and take those ideas to the market. The key isn’t just creating a start-up, the key is funding it and seeing it through. How many of those start-ups are companies with products to offer in the marketplace. Not all smart people are good entrepreneurs.</p>

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<p>I agree Stanford provides tremendous support because when these companies made it big, guess who wins? Stanford.</p>

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<p>This data is meaningless. If you’re good, you’re good. My husband’s company started with four guys and is now a multibillion dollar international leader in it’s field (technology). He went to a state school.</p>

19

<p>Well duh!</p>

20

<p>@amtc:</p>

<p>Data is data. You can make of it what you will (and I don’t see what you’re reacting too; plenty of state schools represented on that list)…</p>

<p>Personally, I find anecdotes to be even more meaningless.</p>