WomenLead Power Networking event. Courtesy photo
Another way PitchBook looked at the data was through female founders. Once again, Stanford reigns over the rest. According to the data, Stanford has had 162 women founders launch 154 companies for a combined capital raised of $2.03 billion. Up next is Harvard University with 121 female founders launching 117 companies. Trailing closely behind is the UC-Berkeley with 118 women founders launching 118 companies. In this dataset, MIT slips all the way to seventh with 82 female entrepreneurs launching 81 ventures. Rounding out the top five are the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University with 112 and 96 female founders, respectively.
Many entrepreneurship experts and professors will say having a successful exit is one of the most important and meaningful pieces of a startup is a successful exit. PitchBook looked at which schools are producing the most entrepreneurs with exits, but the results stayed very much the same. Stanford led the rest with 276 entrepreneurs and 239 companies with exits. Up next is UC-Berkeley with 235 entrepreneurs and 203 companies with exits. Following UC-Berkeley is MIT with 195 founders behind 169 companies. Cornell slipped past Harvard to break up the Boston-Bay Area connection with 149 entrepreneurs and 134 exits. Harvard rounded out the top five with 143 entrepreneurs behind 129 companies with exits.
While launching a successful — and venture-backed startup — is rare, this data suggests the odds of success increasing by attending certain schools.
“Tapping networks remains perhaps the most trusted recourse to finding not only the right people with whom to launch a new venture, but also the right providers of needed capital,” the PitchBook report reads. “And thanks to demographics, biases and more, the people you went to university or graduate programs with remain a key component in your network.”
(See the next page for the complete list of the top 50 schools with the most entrepreneurs.)
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