Do You Need An MBA To Found A Unicorn? History Says … Probably Not

AT TOP B-SCHOOLS, 1 OUT OF 600 BECOMES A UNICORN FOUNDER

In another recent LinkedIn post, Ilya Strebulaev of Stanford Graduate School of Business answers the question, “Which business schools produce the most unicorn founders per capita?”

The “clear winner”: Stanford GSB, with Harvard and MIT Sloan in the next two places. Of the 208 unicorn founders who got an MBA degree between 2000 and 2015, Strebulaev writes, 176 — 85% — got their degree in the United States.

“For each U.S. business school in our sample, we estimated the total number of MBA degrees granted over the same period,” he writes. “Among the top 11 schools, the average is 1.65 per 1,000. This highlights the rarity of unicorn founders. If you attend these top schools, the chances are there will be one to two future unicorn founders in your cohort.”

However, he adds, “it is a far cry from the average in the U.S. for all the other business schools outside top 11: 0.02 per 1,000 MBA degrees or equivalent over the same period. This is one hundred times less than compared to the schools at the top. Among the top schools, on average, one out of 600 students becomes a unicorn founder. For all the other MBAs, one out of about 59,000.”

Which school produced the highest number of unicorn founders per capita? Strebulaev’s employer, Stanford, which has 24 unicorn founders and 5,737 graduates from 2000 to 2015, or 4.2 unicorn founders per 1,000 graduates. That’s one out of each 240 graduates — much more than second place, Harvard, with 2.9 per 1,000. And while HBS is ahead of Stanford GSB in absolute count of unicorn founders, Strebulaev notes that “it is also a much larger school: over this period, there were 2.4 more HBS MBA graduates compared to Stanford GSB.”

MIT Sloan is the third with 2.2 unicorn founders per 1,000 grads, and UC-Berkeley Haas, Columbia Business School and The Wharton School follow, with 1.7, 1.4, and 1.3, respectively.

“While there are a lot of unicorn founders from these schools, we also know that more of their graduates start VC-backed companies,” Strebulaev writes.

ALMOST 30% OF FOUNDERS AT U.S. UNICORNS WENT TO A NON-U.S. SCHOOL

Though he specializes in U.S. companies and most MBAs at U.S.-based unicorns got their degrees at U.S. B-schools, Strebulaev says it’s worth noting that some European universities produced unicorn founders of U.S. unicorns “and are ranked quite high on our list.” INSEAD, for example, is in 11th place with eight unicorn founders; Tel Aviv University is 13th with six unicorn founders who graduated from the Coller School of Management. London Business School has three U.S.-based unicorn founders.

In all, almost 30% of founders of U.S.-based VC-backed unicorns either attended or worked at a non-U.S. university. In the VCI’s dataset, 872 out of 2,916 such founders had an academic or professional connection with a non-U.S. academic institution; among these, Tel Aviv “stands out as a leading hub for entrepreneurial talent, having ‘produced’ an impressive number of 43 unicorn founders,” Strebulaev writes.

The University of Oxford and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology follow closely behind, with 33 and 32 unicorn founders, respectively. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Cambridge, and University of Waterloo are in fourth to sixth places.

“It is also worth noting the significant contributions of universities that are not in the top 10 but serve as the best representatives of their countries,” Strebulaev writes. “For instance, the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi produced 16 unicorn founders, making it the best-performing university in India. Similarly, Tsinghua University in China and INSEAD in France produced 14 and 11 unicorn founders, respectively.”

DON’T MISS WHICH BUSINESS SCHOOLS HAVE PRODUCED THE MOST UNICORN FOUNDERS? THIS STANFORD PROF HAS CRUNCHED THE NUMBERS and THESE SCHOOLS HAVE PRODUCED THE MOST ‘UNICORN’ EXECUTIVES

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