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Which Universities Produce the Most Startup Founders?
Visual Capitalist ^ | 09/26/2024 | Kayla Zhu

Posted on 09/26/2024 9:16:12 PM PDT by SeekAndFind

Starting a successful startup requires a great idea and a huge amount of resilience, but attending the right university - one with a strong reputation, world-class education, and influential connections - can give aspiring founders a crucial advantage.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Kayla Zhu, visualizes the top 10 undergraduate and graduate schools ranked by the number of alumni who have founded their own startups.

Every year, PitchBook ranks universities across the world by the number of alumni entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital in the last decade, by undergraduate, graduate, and MBA programs.

Only founders whose companies received a round of venture funding between Jan. 1, 2013, and Aug. 1, 2024 were counted, with the data updated as of August 30, 2024. Founders can attend multiple schools and may be counted towards multiple universities.

Stanford University is a Hotspot for Entrepreneurs

Below, we show the top 10 undergraduate schools by number of alumni founders.

This table shows the top 10 graduate schools by number of founders.

Located in the heart of the Silicon Valley, Stanford University boasts an impressive track record of producing thousands of startup founders over the past 10 years.

It ranks first in the graduate category, with over 4,000 founders having attended one of its graduate programs—the highest number across all three categories—and second in the undergraduate category.

Notable founders from Stanford include OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who dropped out of school, and Robinhood co-founder Vladimir Tenev.

UC Berkeley ranked first overall in the undergraduate category, and was the top-ranked public school in the graduate category, coming in at fifth. DoorDash’s founder and CEO Tony Xu and supply chain management company Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen went to undergrad at Berkeley.

Both Stanford and UC Berkeley are located in or near the San Francisco Bay Area, which was ranked as the best startup city in the world by PitchBook.

Among PitchBook’s top 10 undergrad and graduate schools, only three non-American schools make the cut: Israel’s Tel Aviv University, and UK-based University of Cambridge and University of Oxford.

To learn more about some of the best college institutions, check out this graphic that visualizes America’s top universities as ranked by Forbes.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Education; Society
KEYWORDS: startups; universities

1 posted on 09/26/2024 9:16:12 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Berkeley? No way.


2 posted on 09/26/2024 9:47:14 PM PDT by Jyotishi (Seeking the truth, a fact at a time.)
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To: SeekAndFind

Merely starting a startup is meaningless, anyone can do that. With identifying a particular degree is success, that measurement is useless.


3 posted on 09/26/2024 9:47:23 PM PDT by Fido969
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To: Fido969
About what I was thinking.

They got people to give them money to start something. Ok. Thousands of people do that on Kickstarter every day.

Did they finish it, did it work, is it in business five years down the road?

4 posted on 09/26/2024 9:57:34 PM PDT by Harmless Teddy Bear ( Not my circus. Not my monkeys. But I can pick out the clowns at 100 yards.)
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To: SeekAndFind

so ‘they’ are saying that the man in the street cannot ‘startup’ a business, and be successful, without a degree?

Tell that to the hot dog cart guy outside the building-!


5 posted on 09/26/2024 10:09:26 PM PDT by Terry L Smith
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To: SeekAndFind

It could be that those that started up a business saw that going to a university was a waste of time for them.


6 posted on 09/27/2024 1:58:52 AM PDT by minnesota_bound (Need more money to buy everything now)
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To: SeekAndFind

Standford........

Elizabeth Holmes (who founded Theranos) went to Stanford....


7 posted on 09/27/2024 2:02:41 AM PDT by Gaffer
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To: SeekAndFind

Now, do it by degree. Somehow, I think gender studies and sociology will be at the bottom of that list.


8 posted on 09/27/2024 5:48:31 AM PDT by chuckee
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To: Jyotishi

Berkeley engineering is very different than Berkeley Crazy.
They do tend to lean very left but usually good engineers.


9 posted on 09/27/2024 6:30:17 AM PDT by Zathras
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To: Gaffer

Andy Grove, founder of Intel started at Stanford and taught classes at Stanford while at Intel.
Drove to classes and work in a beat up MB wagon with over 300k miles.


10 posted on 09/27/2024 6:32:38 AM PDT by Zathras
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To: Harmless Teddy Bear

I’d guess that half of the Berkeley startups were pot business that failed after about a year.


11 posted on 09/27/2024 7:22:59 AM PDT by Fido969
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