Most unicorn founders are graduates of Stanford, Harvard, and the IITs | Hacker News Reader

Most unicorn founders are graduates of Stanford, Harvard, and the IITs

qz.com

80 pointselmar59 comments

This ordering is bunk because the author makes no attempt to normalize for student population. Larger schools have a massive advantage compared to smaller ones.

Compare the University of California and MIT. University of California has 250,000 students and MIT has 11,000. After normalizing the data, MIT produces 1 unicorn per 1,200 yearly enrolled student, while UoC produces 1 unicorn per 13,900 yearly enrolled student. By this list, MIT students are 10x more likely to found a unicorn compared to UoC students but are ranked lower in this list.

The authors shouldn't even be combining all ten UC schools in the first place as each runs as a separate university with their own faculty, admissions, etc.

A similar argument applies to the IITs.

IITs collectively have only 33k undergrads, according to wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technolog...

That would make the entire system comparable to a large state school in the US. They do have proportionally more grad students, so total student body is right around the biggest state schools - Florida, Texas, Ohio, etc.

Definitely not on the same level as Stanford or Harvard, but still very impressive.

That's after accounting for the recent increases in student intake. All but the oldest seven have started in the last decade, and the older seven have also increased their intake by 50-100% in the meanwhile. So, as of a decade ago, the IITs would have been graduating ~2000 undergrads per year, all seven institutions combined. (The counting is a little complicated, but I expect that number to be less than ~3000 nonetheless)

That's the relevant number, since those who've founded unicorns can probably be assumed to have started their undergraduate education at least a decade ago. (4-5 years in college and then at least a few years working).

A billion people and such a tiny investment in education. Wow. Indians are lucky that's finally starting to change.

Surprisingly, most oppose the creation of new IITs, claiming that it "dilutes" the brand.

Interesting fact, per capita Israelis have founded more billion dollar startups than any other nationality.

Populating a nation completely with immigrants, and getting a lot of foreign investment, creates and enablesand ambitious population.

>After normalizing the data, MIT produces 1 unicorn per 1,200 yearly enrolled student, while UoC produces 1 unicorn per 13,900 yearly enrolled student. By this list, MIT students are 10x more likely to found a unicorn compared to UoC students but are ranked lower in this list.

For this to be a fair criticism you would have to look only at the respective Colleges of Engineering for each UC, rather than the undergrad aggregate. MIT is a STEM focused university, with a far narrower list of majors than UC. Naturally that would lead to higher rates overall.

It isn't at all clear from the article (or from the source article either) whether it is talking about UC Berkeley (aka Cal) or the UC system. The source is British and might not see the difference. Cal is a fair comparison with Stanford, MIT, .... The UC system wouldn't be.

I heard Mike Naples from floodgate say that 90% worldwide >$1B exits are on a 50 miles radius from Stanford, I searched but never knew where he got this numbers.

The article stops just short of implying a causal connection between what school you go to and whether you're going to "found a unicorn" but come on! Maybe, just maybe, could it be that this deserves a little deeper look? Perhaps people who have the opportunity to go to one of these top schools have that opportunity because of some other structural advantage that also provides them the opportunity to found a unicorn? Like, maybe, I dunno, existing family wealth and connections? Just a wild guess with no research into it...

They also likely acquire a lot of amazing connections at those schools.

Furthermore, their qualifications after graduation from these school are more respected regardless of the quality of the education described by the degree.

Top tier schools are almost like a noble title on the East coast. Out West it's less extreme but it still matters. I've lived in both places.

Just the other day, there was a job posting on HN for a new health care startup.

It pissed me off, frankly, because the ad was not framed in terms of actual accomplishments or credentials or skills, but in terms of whether or not you attended an elite school. As in it literally stated that they were looking for people from "top 10 schools" or some such thing.

They made it abundantly clear they did not care about someone's actual abilities or skills, only what their pedigree was.

What makes me so angry is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. This article is a natural extension of that process.

I loathe recent political trends in the US, but I'm not surprised at all to see the populism that's arisen. Society is dripping with nepotism of various forms.

Obviously. I think the biggest benefit this group has is the safety to fail. I worked 40+ hours and was doing 12+ credits for my undergrad. When I graduated, I had massive loans and bills to pay. I wonder what I could have done if I had two years with no bills to work on something and zero debt looming.

The easiest way to take care of this problem is to continue to live like you're in undergrad but take a well-paying job in finance or tech afterwards, work for 4-5 years, pay off your loans, and bank a lot of money. If you're earning $160K/year but living on $20K/year, debt goes down really fast.

You start later than someone who went to Stanford and comes from a wealthy, well-connected family. You're not going to be Mark Zuckerburg or Evan Spiegel and found a billion-dollar company at 22. But realistically, you're looking at late-20s, which is about when your Ph.D and M.D. friends are starting their careers and still gives you plenty of good productive years ahead of you. And the time you spend in industry is invaluable for learning how the world really works, which problems are really important, and all the other stuff they don't teach you in college.

That would definitely work if you can find it, but it is pretty impossible to find a $160K/year coming out of the local state school. At least where I'm from....

You don't do it directly. You find the best-paying job you can, work there, do some open-source work in your nights & weekends, and then start looking for a new job when you're about 6 months in, on the strength of your work experience & open-source portfolio. Repeat 2-3 times at roughly 1-year increments until one of the big firms comes knocking. I started at $8/hour at my first programming job and doubled my income every time I switched.

You may have to move - if there are no jobs in your area, go where the jobs are! Once you're past entry-level positions you can often get a new employer to pay for your move though.

The big secret about "elite" institutions is that they're constantly looking for signs that they fucked up about their judgment of a person, and are usually happy to rectify that if they see concrete information that they were wrong. This goes for universities (I know several people who totally slacked off in high school, got rejected by all the Ivies, went to a state school, did nothing but study in college, and then transferred back into an Ivy), for the big-5 tech companies (where oftentimes people will get in on the second try after a few more years work experience and demonstrable progress launching products for their current employer), and for venture capitalists (who will often pass on a company and then beg to be let back into a later funding round, at a much higher price, if it looks like a startup is taking off). The problem is that most people adjust their performance to the expectations of people around them. If you're not satisfied with where you are in life, act like the people who you want to be. Eventually they'll take notice and decide you're one of them.

I'll second this. 4 companies across three years before landing at Amazon.

The safety to fail is definitely part of it. Whenever I hear someone talk about how they succeeded by 'simply' failing over and over again until they hit it big, I'm reminded of the "Swamp Castle" Monty Python skit: "But the fourth one stayed up!" Well no kidding! If you have the safety net to survive lots of failed endeavors, chances are you'll eventually make it.

Having graduated Harvard myself with substantial student loans and no parental financial support, and knowing many others like myself, I think your generalization is off the mark. I would look at a different advantage, which is social capital rather than financial capital. VCs and other relevant players in the tech ecosystem also come from the same schools. If there is an advantagr, I think it is more likely through that network than that the entrepreneurs were rich enough to have a financial safety net (though that is certainly possible too - there may be a further selection of graduates that,those that were wealthy became entrepreneurs but I would think that effect would be less tied to school than social capital)

More than safety to fail , they have millions of dollars of investment waiting for them before they even start

Exactly. I've heard it said that you can remove all the classes and teachers from a prestigious university. Let the students do whatever they want. And they'd still do just as well.

I doubt it's just wealth. Those schools are fairly selective and difficult to get into beyond just financial reasons. Presumably the selected students are more likely to have higher IQs or higher conscientiousness or whatever.

Existing family wealth and connections? Maybe.

But what about skill, ability, creativity, ambition, determination? Do the people doing this work deserve no credit?

> Do the people doing this work deserve no credit?

Of course they deserve credit. The question is, what about the people with "skill, ability, creativity, ambition, determination" but no family wealth and connections? Do they deserve even more credit if they succeed?

What if a lack of wealth and connections proves too much of a limiting factor (i.e. nothing to show other than a serious attempt)? Do they still deserve credit? Of course, credit for failure is a bit of an oxymoron so maybe those with the necessary wealth and connections will only ever be the ones to get credit. Is that not a problem?

One simple, practical factor that shouldn't be overlooked in the case of Stanford's rank here is that it is literally in the middle of Silicon Valley. The physical and mental inertia to moving to SV from wherever else you are can be very real. I'd bet the distribution of where those unicorns were started location-wise is like 70% SV, 30% spread across Boston, SoCal, and the rest. Similar to how YC makes everybody move to SV to start...

IIT grads get funded to study using taxpayers money in India and they migrate to the US. There is no use for the country funding them with high quality education. We should stop funding IITs with tax payers money which is of no benefit to the people or the country. India's brain drain.

The proportion of IIT graduates leaving India has significantly decreased over the years. Last year just 200 went abroad.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/indias-brain-...

The article is highly misleading. Only 200 students got job offers from international companies in on campus placements.

The majority that head out go for graduate education. The statistic doesn't take them into consideration.

The 200 is absolutely bogus.

While it is indeed a problem that most graduates of IIT leave India, the solution is most certainly not to terminate its funding. There can be other mechanisms put in place, like owing the govt. sponsored fees if the worker decides to leave the country and such.

Unfortunately for the US, proposed revisions to immigration policy may be sending more of that brain drain back.

Also, in general, more public funding for education does pay for itself in the long run, though I'm not sure how that's adjusted for net emigration.

(Edit: corrected fat fingered typo.)

So true. I got my CS degree at a top school in US, I work at a good startup and get paid very well. But I am so disillusioned with the United States, I feel like going back to India is much better than being an H1B slave.

Interesting point. The same could be said about K-12 education (in the US), where it's funded by local communities through property taxes but the grads often pick up and move to cities like NYC and SF. However, providing a differing education to those who are gifted has low marginal costs - AP teachers are paid the same amount, and teachers will often take less pay to work with motivated students. Obviously, students (and adults) who fall from the cracks may become dependent on the local communities, so there is high ROI for the taxpayer there as well.

Broadly speaking and if it can be done effectively, funding education on a higher municipal level makes more sense as it's less likely recipients will take their education elsewhere.

This could also be a variant of a self-fulfilling prophecy. VCs tend to fund Standford/Harvard/MIT teams more and more often, because other teams from those universities produced great results previously.

Unicorn startups seem to tend to be things with mass public appeal, and also often tend to be losing money and fail to ever turn into a sustainable profitable business.

If you broaden this to look at startups in general, then the list of top schools is a bit different. UCLA is at the top [1].

They have a lot of startups that most of the public, and probably most of HN, would never have heard of. These are companies doing things like cancer therapy or treating industrial wastewater. They come out of the biology or chemistry or civil engineering departments, not the computer science department.

Caltech has a similar startup profile [2]. That link gives a big list of Caltech startups and what they do. Most of them are working in areas I don't think I've ever seen mentioned on HN. I read somewhere that when size is taken into account, Caltech is at or near the top in startup creation rate.

I think MIT is similar.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-startups-20170707...

[2] http://innovation.caltech.edu/startups/

The definition in the article is that a unicorn is privately held startup with $1billion or more valuation.

I understand that it might be difficult to get the data, but I can't avoid being skeptical about the value of such companies, when there's no mention of profitability...

1. Why are they interested in unicorns? 2. Are these just US companies? I would assume that there are a bunch of Chinese unicorns? 3. The study looked at only a few factors and correlation does not imply causation and the past is not a predictor of the future. The factors were school, gender, and previous attempts.

Therefore without more measures, we seem to be doing a whole lot of speculating on cause and effect with a very, very narrow lenses. Seems like we are mostly exposing our own narrow views rather than how the world actually is.

This is almost tautological. I'd like to see this weighted by the pedigrees of teams that get funding.

Class and wealth pretending to be worthy of merit.

I can confirm that this is not true in the case of IITs. Admissions are purely through a your score in a common examination and nothing else.

Getting into CS/ECE in an IIT (especially the ones of repute) needs you to be in the top 0.01% (or top 1000 among a million) that give the exam every year.

It is almost a certainty that every student that ends up getting a top 1000 rank for IITs has slogged his ass off for the 2 years of their life simply to get in.

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