
Which Universities Produce the Most Successful Startup Founders? - minimaxir
http://minimaxir.com/2013/07/alma-mater-data/
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mindcrime
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?

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wh-uws
Exactly I rarely resort to the global replace comment but:

s/successful/venture funded/g

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zalzane
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>

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timr
_" 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.

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djcapelis
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.

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jcfrei
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.

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minimaxir
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.

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cuttooth
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.

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woah
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.

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cocoflunchy

        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

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minimaxir
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!)

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

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

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danhak
Figures should be normalized based on size of graduating class.

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

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mjn
_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.

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andrewchoi
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.

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anshublog
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".

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RobLach
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.)

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

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minimaxir
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. ;)

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edwardy20
Another interesting question: what degrees do startup founders hold?

