These Schools Have the Highest Likelihood of ‘Producing’ a Unicorn Founder

If you’re intent on becoming a unicorn founder, you may want to attend Yale University or Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A new analysis by Ilya Strebulaev, a venture capital and private equity professor at Stanford University, looked at which undergraduate programs produced the most unicorn founders (the term ‘unicorn’ refers to a privately held startup company with a value of over $1 billion). The analysis found that attending Yale and MIT increases the odds by 70%, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University by 60%, and University of California, Berkeley by 50%.

A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

Strebulaev’s analysis identified the undergraduate alma maters of 2,329 out of 2,975 founders of US-based VC-backed unicorns. Additionally, it looked at the educational backgrounds of 1,807 out of 2,340 founders of randomly selected VC-backed companies, with matching criteria limited to the year of their inaugural VC funding round.

Stanford University has the highest percentage of founders in the unicorn sample (5.2%) and the highest percentage of random sample founders (3.2%), with a ratio between percentages of unicorn and random sample founders of 1.6.

“It means that getting an undergraduate degree from Stanford increases one’s chances of achieving unicorn status (if one founds a VC-backed startup) by 60%,” Strebulaev says.

Other universities that made the list include: Harvard University (30%), Cornell University (30%), and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (20%).

Sources: LinkedIn, Investopedia