What backgrounds do unicorn ($1B+ valuation) startup founders have?

By the numbers, the top 3 most common…

Employers are: Google, Microsoft, Stanford University.
Universities are: Stanford, MiT, Harvard.
States are: California, New York, Masachusetts.

Source: Ilya Strebulaev, professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Posted by DoubleSkew

9 comments

  1. i’d be interested in seeing family net worth of these founders prior to their company’s 1b valuation.

  2. Clicked on this because I thought it would be desktop backgrounds

  3. Unicorn founders of unicorns that made unicorns using unicorns

  5. Think we need a new name, unicorn is kinda dumb when there are 1000 of them.

  6. While the data is very interesting, that first picture especially is a terrible visualization. Circles to represent integer values? Essentially completely devoid of useful labels?

    What are we doing here. Hell, I could do a better job than this.

  7. What’s the 4th logo from the left in the top row in the first image?

  8. iof being 4th is EXACTLY the standard I expect from silicon valley. These guys have stopped generating actual value and started jerking each other off through sheer speculation decades ago. First the web3 and now AI bs, chasing anything that makes a profit fuck ethics even the big ones abandoned that long ago. Short-term profit and that VC peter thiel money is king. I wonder when it will bite back

  9. It’s also a reinforcing feedback loop. If investors think founders come out of certain colleges they will keep investing in founders from those colleges, minimizing investment in founders from other really good schools, which in some cases has better pockets of talent (UMich, UW-Madison, UT-Austin, etc).

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