These Schools Are Most Likely to “Produce” a Unicorn

US startup founders who studied or worked at University of Cincinnati are 3.3 times more likely to achieve unicorn status. Founders from the University of Utah stand a 3.2 times better chance. At Yale University and Vanderbilt University, chances increase by 2.0 times. Stanford University founders see a 1.6 chance, while the University of California, Berkeley stands at 1.5.

“We started by identifying the educational and professional background for founders of 1,110 US-based VC-backed unicorns and 1,028 randomly selected VC-backed companies,” Ilya Strebulaev, a professor at Stanford and author of the study, wrote in a LinkedIn post. Of that group, 1,081 unicorns and 961 random sample startups had at least one founder associated with a university.

Strebulaev and his team examined universities linked to unicorn companies and compared them with those in a random sample group to ascertain which were most likely associated with unicorn founders.

For instance, out of the 1,081 unicorns analyzed by the team, the University of Cincinnati was associated with 1%, while it was linked to 0.3% of the 961 startups in the random sample. By dividing these two percentages, yields 3.3, which Strebulaev describes as “the odds ratio of producing a unicorn.”

FOUNDERS FROM MIDWEST SCHOOLS MAY SEE MORE SUCCESS

In Strebulaev’s study, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Utah were most likely to have founders who achieved unicorn status. While more research needs to be done to validate these findings, Strebulaev says that regional bias may play an important role in how likely it is for founders to get funding.

“In my other academic research I also show that networks in smaller, less prestigious places are ‘tighter’ meaning that VCs from those schools are more likely to back grads from those schools,” Strebulaev says in a LinkedIn comment.

Sources: LinkedIn, Entrepreneur