Which Universities Produce the Most Successful Startup Founders? | Hacker News Reader

Which Universities Produce the Most Successful Startup Founders?

minimaxir.com

43 pointsminimaxir23 comments

Am I the only one who doesn't find this terribly interesting, due to thinking that "funding != success"? Raising money is a step on the path to success (and potentially an optional one at that), so a chart of "which universities graduates raised the most money" doesn't strike me as terribly valuable.

Of course, I imagine it would be a lot harder (and maybe more subjective) to come up with a different metric for success, since not all startups wind up publicly traded (and therefore required to report their financials) and some are acquired in deals where the terms aren't reported, etc.

Anyway, even if we use funding as the metric of success, what are we supposed to do with the data from this analysis? Is it supposed to suggest where one should choose to go to school, or to suggest that other schools should try to mirror aspects of the schools listed, or what?

Exactly I rarely resort to the global replace comment but:

s/successful/venture funded/g

Correlation does not imply causation.

While this article may portray the trend as "universities that produce successful startup founders", it's very possible that it may actually be something like "prestigious universities attract people that come from well connected families who have an easier time creating a successful startup".

I have very little faith in higher educational institutions' ability to actually educate and prepare people like potential startup founders for the real world. This trend of successful startup founders coming out of prestigious universities makes a lot more sense when you consider that high-end unis tend to attract people from affluent, well connected backgrounds.

This isn't to say that rich kids have an easier time creating startups. Rather, I think that affluent families typically become affluent through the ability to form business connections with people, and the ability to form a vast contact network. Through parental influence, these attributes are passed to the children who go on to attend prestigious universities, and eventually create a business for themselves.

</endarmchairpettheory>

"Correlation does not imply causation."

Stop saying that.

To quote Edward Tufte: "Correlation is not causation, but it sure is a hint."

In this case, I don't know if fundraising should be considered "success", but I'm reasonably sure that graduating from Stanford does a lot to grease the funding skids in Silicon Valley. In other words, it might well be a causative factor for success. The appearance of a whole bunch of smoke strongly suggests a fire, not a big smoke machine.

This basically tells us that the people investors fund are most likely to get funded. It tells us nothing about their success.

Cargo cult success metrics are bad for everyone.

Since when does the amount of venture capital raised equal the success of a startup? A much more interesting statistic would have been which founders are still running their business after let's say three years.

Unfortunately that's a little harder to determine from the data given. The amount of deadpooled businesses in the data set is not high. :\

Using funding as a leading indicator is not perfect, which is one of the reasons I have provided the raw data.

People who go to Ivy League schools typically have wealthier parents and/or families who can fund their education. Subsequently this can likely carry over to their receiving support while they start a new company, not to mention the connections gained from attending such prestigious schools.

Granted that this does not apply to every case and there are true bootstrapping stories out there, but the fact of the matter is that wealth generates wealth and capitalism is the trademark of the startup industry. It has very little to do with the actual education in the end.

Mods, please change title to "Which Universities Produce the Most Funded Startup Founders", as the current title is misleading as to the content of the article.

    It’s worth noting that Tel Aviv University, an Israeli university, 
    ties Duke University at 21 and unfortunately just missed making the chart.

Why not leave Duke out or put TAU in? It did not 'unfortunately miss making the chart', you decided to leave it out of the chart.

And today I learned that Stanford ant MIT were not part of the Ivy League ;)

edit: typo

Because I created the charts programmically, and there may have been a sorting issue since the numbers are equal.

I'll see if I can fit in a 16th university, or manually replace Duke.

EDIT: Done. Sorry about the confusion (I'm still learning!)

It's still not showing on the page for me.

Try a CTRL+R refresh. That should work. (Cloudflare can be very annoying sometimes, even after clearing the cache manually)

Figures should be normalized based on size of graduating class.

Here's the # of Graduating Founders graph as a proportion of # of Undergraduates at the University: http://i.imgur.com/tawHy2e.png

The order is not much different (Stanford is still way at the top), although a few of the Ivy League schools are higher.

Carnegie Mellon and Princeton, which had a relatively low number of funded founders and a relatively low number of total capital raised, instead have a significantly higher amount of average first funding. UCLA also placed. Perhaps the students from these three universities tend to have more ambitious startup ideas?

The field of endeavor may have more to do with it than ambition. Pittsburgh startups are disproportionately in biotech, for example, which tends to be capital-intensive.

I feel like the statistics are misleading with respect to the total pool that you're drawing out of. Of course, if you have a school like UC Berkeley that has 25k undergrads, you're going to have more funding than a school like Princeton with 5k undergrads. Per-capita stats would be nice to see.

Also, maybe schools with MBA programs might need to be compared separately. Princeton doesn't have one, and seems to lack somewhat in terms of on campus non-technical founders.

There are 32 from Indian Institutes of Technology. (But the data is under various names.) IITs (acronym) are unique because its a really small system - graduating 2500 students across all 5 IITs in 1996 for example. Would be one of the few foreign university systems to bubble up.

How: Look for the words or substring "Indian Institute" and "IIT".

Errr.. out of curiosity I did a simple/quick query of my alma mater (UIUC) and got a count of 35.

Perhaps it was missed because Unversity of Illinois refers to University of Illinois : Urbana-Champaign if it lacks a city qualifier. (Also a few founders misspelled Champaign so I just included Urbana.)

Normally I would have expected Danielle Morrill here, but good job anyway ;)

Honestly, the reason I'm looking more into startup statistics is because I'm very skeptical of dmor's analyses that are posted to HN. So I took a look at CrunchBase's data to see how robust it truly is. ;)

Another interesting question: what degrees do startup founders hold?

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