Again here is top 10 list, who went Stanford undergrad school ?
Billionaires ranking in Tech-Startup area (undergrad)
Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn?
Jerry Yang from Yahoo?
Stanford is also successful at producing Top 10 football players too:
:))
Thank you for proving detailed info about SnapChat, which is founded by Evan Spiegel who is currently “the most successful” Stanford undergrad alumni in tech industry.
By the way, Facebook is worth $450 billion and Mark Zukerberg is 3rd richest man in tech area, and 5th richest man in the world.
Even Dustin Moskovitz, who contributed very little to Facebook foundation, is 3 times richer than Evan Spiegel.
So?? You think you wouldn’t be happy with 20 billion dollars? Who cares if one guy who DROPPED OUT of Harvard hit it big?
Schools are schools. They’re all fine in some ways and suck in others. Even precious Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.
Are they current top 10 ??
The first Stanford undergrad on Forbes 400 billionaire list - 76. Charles Schwab.
Here is formular for tech industry.
Largest start-up funding + Silicon Valley location + best networking + etc == The best resources and opportunities for start-ups success for most students.
The best resources and opportunities + Stanford undergraduate education ==> best outcome is SnapChat founders.
Please explain to me why you’re so dismissive of 20 billion dollars. Is that chump change to you?
20 billion is amazing if SnapChat founders are from mediocre schools.
However, Stanford advertises so much about best start-up opportunities and entrepreneur atmosphere.
Stanford undergrads also get the largest VC funding opportunities, Silicon Valley locations and other first class resources
Stanford’s undergrad outcome is somewhat disappointing, even though more resources are available to them.
Not sure what your agenda is @JamesVanc (especially with Stanford Admit Weekend going on and college decisions due in a few days), but you repeatedly choose to ignore the fact that:
Zuckerberg and Gates are Harvard dropouts. So by your convoluted logic is going to Harvard an impediment to becoming a top ten tech billionaire? Or is it a requirement that in order to be on the list one has to go to Harvard and then drop out? Please enlighten us how this all works.
Many of the people on your list chose to relocate to locations within just a few miles of Stanford (Google, Facebook, not to mention others not on the list such as the largest tech firm in the world - Apple) in order to draw from the rich talent pool coming out of Stanford as well as being close to VCs and other top tech firms from which they can collaborate with or hire away top talent. None of companies on your list are located in Boston, Cambridge or Princeton.
Some of the people on your list attended Stanford’s grad schools. For example, Google’s first storage server is proudly on display at Stanford because Sergei Brin and Larry Page’s work was heavily supported by Stanford professors Hector Garcia Molina, Rajeev Motwani, Jeffery Ullman, and Terry Winograd as well as a grant from Stanford.
NOBODY makes a college decision based upon the idea that they have a greater chance of becoming one of the top ten richest tech persons in a world of 7 billion people. Especially, if they understand the role that serendipity played in the people on your list’s success. They should, however, make such a decision factoring in the chance of landing a good job or academic career in the fields they may be interested in as well as where might be an environment they will be happy to study in. Stanford scores high marks on both of those criteria.
You are using outliers to make your case. There is no statistical relevance to your claims, whatsoever. Harvard must have graduated 70,000 students since Bill Gates dropped out and only one other dropout since then made the list. Again, what are we supposed to infer from this? There is a lot of data missing to draw any type of conclusions. The same goes for your other thread about law schools. We know nothing about how many students from Stanford even go into law these days let alone where they apply and what their acceptance rate at those schools is.
The richest finance person in the world, Warren Buffet, was rejected by Harvard and attended the University of Nebraska. Does this mean that Harvard is not the place to go to if you want to be a top ten overall billionaire in finance? Or does it mean you have to go to Columbia Business School like he did for grad school. I don’t understand. Oh wait, grad school doesn’t count in your eyes.
Finally, MIT is also not represented on your list. I guess it is another also ran school which no one should consider if they had any brains or aspirations of being a top ten tech person on the planet.
Again, your repeated specious arguments really call into question what your true agenda is. Stanford is a dominant force in the tech world and will be for as long as it remains in the epicenter of companies engaged in technological innovation. I don’t see this changing anytime soon.
@JamesVanc Since you joined CC shortly after college decisions came out, I can only assume you were waitlisted by Stanford and your barrage of negative threads and posts is some vain attempt to dissuade students from accepting Stanford’s offer. I doubt it will work but good luck to you.
Are folks on both sides really arguing that a person’s undergrad school plays an outsized role in that person’s success?
There are so many mediocre grads from every top school that it should be clear that a person’s work ethic and grit play a more important role than their undergrad school for heaven’s sake!
Going to a top school guarantees nothing. And looking at numbers of billionaires from a school or the number of startups by a school’s grads is very misleading. There could be huge selection bias going on and those numbers tell you nothing on whether or not you are more likely to start a company if you go to Stanford vs San Jose State.
The simplest explanation is that more students interested in starting their own company landed up at Stanford and less landed up at San Jose State or some other school. It doesn’t mean that if an average student lands up at Stanford, he or she will land up starting their own company!
Closing thread. It’s just going in circles.