
Most unicorn founders are graduates of Stanford, Harvard, and the IITs - elmar
https://qz.com/896280/most-unicorn-founders-in-the-world-are-graduates-of-stanford-harvard-and-the-indian-institutes-of-technology-iits/
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tristanj
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.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technolog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology)

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.

~~~
ssivark
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).

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

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

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ryandrake
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...

~~~
snarf21
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.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
snarf21
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....

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
njwi332
I'll second this. 4 companies across three years before landing at Amazon.

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throw2bit
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.

~~~
dimmuborgir
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-...](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/indias-brain-gain-
fewer-than-200-iit-grads-went-abroad-last-year/articleshow/56578855.cms)

~~~
screye
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.

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olegkikin
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.

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tzs
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...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-
startups-20170707-story.html)

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

------
patrickg_zill
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...

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babesh
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.

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

------
onetokeoverthe
Class and wealth pretending to be worthy of merit.

~~~
screye
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.

