The MBA Is An American Degree: Exclusive Data On B-Schools And The World’s Unicorn Founders

In my recent article I examined MBA graduates among U.S. unicorn founders. This piece extends that work to the rest of the world, drawing on the dataset my team and I have assembled at the Stanford GSB Venture Capital Initiative: 4,021 unicorns worldwide and 6,729 founders, with hand-collected education records covering 4,487 of them.

One thing this analysis cannot yet do is tell you whether a business degree improves your odds. That requires a matched random sample of non-US VC-backed companies, which we are still building. What follows is descriptive: who holds what, and where they studied. The odds ratios will come later, and they will be worth the wait.

THE FINDING I DID NOT EXPECT: THE MBA RATE IS THE SAME EVERYWHERE 

Among U.S. unicorn founders with education data, 15.8% hold an MBA. Among founders outside the U.S., the figure is 15.0%. Roughly one in seven unicorn founders holds an MBA, and it makes no difference which continent the company is on.

I expected a gap. The MBA is an American invention, American schools dominate every ranking, and the U.S. venture ecosystem is the oldest and deepest. And yet the fraction of MBA founders is the same in the U.S. and outside the U.S.

There are differences, of course, but somewhere else entirely, and they should not come as a surprise to anybody who knows global business education trends. Look at business master’s degrees that are not MBAs: the MSc in Finance, the specialist master’s in management, the degrees that European and Asian schools have offered for decades:

A non-U.S. unicorn founder is more than four times as likely as an American one to hold a business master’s that is not an MBA. Put differently: among founders holding any business master’s, 87% of Americans hold an MBA specifically. Outside the U.S., that figure is 59%. Outside the U.S., a large share of business-educated founders arrived through a different door.

WHICH DOOR, EXACTLY

Breaking the non-MBA business master’s down by field makes the pattern concrete:

Management shows the sharpest contrast: 27 non-U.S. founders against 4 American ones. Finance runs nearly two to one. These are the specialist master’s degrees that European and Indian business schools built their reputations on, degrees that in the U.S. barely exist as a founder pathway.

One caveat on the American column. Stanford accounts for 19 of the U.S. non-MBA business master’s founders, more than any other school in the world. Most of those are Management Science & Engineering degrees, a program in Stanford’s engineering school rather than the GSB.

INSEAD, NOT HARVARD

Ranked by total MBA-holding unicorn founders, the picture is familiar: Harvard 116, Stanford 84, Wharton 54, Columbia 32. Rank instead by founders of non-U.S. unicorns, and a different school comes first:

For the first time in my work on MBA rankings, neither Harvard nor Stanford is in first place. INSEAD is ahead, just by one, in the number of non-U.S. unicorn founders with an MBA degree. Of course, Harvard and Stanford still produced 13 founders of non-U.S. unicorns each.

Of all the schools that produced five or more unicorn founders with an MBA degree, four are outside the U.S.: in addition to INSEAD (France), these are London Business School (UK), IIM Ahmedabad (India), and IESE (Spain).

The last column shows the share of each school’s MBA founders who founded unicorns outside the U.S.

WHO FOUNDS WHERE

If American business schools dominate global rankings, do they also dominate the founding of non-American unicorns? The answer is no.

Among MBA-holding founders of non-U.S. unicorns, slightly more attended a non-U.S. school than an American one. Local schools hold their own ground. Excluding Chinese unicorns, where our education coverage is weakest, does not change the results.

The striking asymmetry runs the other way. 484 founders with U.S. business degrees built American unicorns; only 73 with non-U.S. degrees did. At the same time, 47% of MBA-holding founders of non-U.S. unicorns, just under half, trained at an American business school.

THE RETENTION PROBLEM

For each country with business schools in our data, we can also ask what share of that country’s business-school founders went on to build a unicorn in that same country. Call it retention.

American business schools keep 88% of their unicorn founders. India keeps 59%. India appears to be the one non-American ecosystem large enough, and distinct enough, to absorb its own business-school graduates. China points the same way at 50%, but our data on Chinese education needs improvement.

The United Kingdom is the extreme case: twenty-five MBA-holding unicorn founders trained at British business schools, and only two of them built British companies. Widen to all business master’s degrees and it is six out of forty-three. Most UK MBAs leave the UK. Someone should mention this to the new UK Prime Minister.

Israel is nearly as stark: only four of twenty-three built Israeli companies.  Given that Israel has a large domestic unicorn ecosystem, this is not a shortage of local opportunity. France retains six of thirty-three.

AT THE COMPANY LEVEL

Counting companies rather than people: 29.3% of U.S. unicorns have at least one MBA co-founder, against 22.1% of non-U.S. unicorns. Widen the definition to any business master’s and the gap closes entirely: 32.7% against 33.6%. Roughly a third of unicorns everywhere have a business-educated founder. Only the type of degree differs.

WHAT THIS MEANS IF YOU ARE CHOOSING A SCHOOL

Three things follow, with the caveat that this analysis describes who founded unicorns rather than proving what caused it.

First, the MBA is not a specifically American feature of unicorn founders. It is roughly as common among unicorn founders everywhere.

Second, the specialist business master’s is a real founder pathway outside the U.S., and an almost invisible one within it.

Third, look at where a school’s founders build. INSEAD, LBS, IIM Ahmedabad and IESE place most of their unicorn founders outside the United States; Harvard, Stanford and Wharton overwhelmingly place theirs inside it. Since so much of what a business school offers is the network (co-founders, early hires, and investors who share your alma mater), the school’s location is an important component of your decision.

WHAT THE DATA CANNOT TELL YOU YET

Our education coverage is uneven. We have education records for 80% of U.S. unicorn founders but presently only 42% of non-U.S. founders, weighed down most by founders from China, for which the figure is 22%.

Founders whose education we have not yet traced are more likely to have studied domestically, which means the non-U.S. school counts in the cross-founding table should be read as a floor rather than an estimate. If anything, I expect local business schools to be underrepresented above.

Once again: no odds ratios. Everything here describes who founded unicorns, not whether the degree helped. Harvard and Stanford appear at the top of the global ranking partly because they are large and admit people who were going to found companies anyway. Answering the causal question for non-U.S. founders requires the matched random sample we are building now. That analysis is coming, and I hope it will tell a prospective student something actionable.

METHODOLOGICAL NOTES

The data combines commercial and proprietary datasets, public sources, and extensive hand-collection by my research team. The sample covers 4,021 unicorns and 6,729 founders; 4,487 founders have usable education records. Geography refers to the company’s headquarters country, not the founder’s nationality or the school’s location.

A founder counts once regardless of how many unicorns they founded. Two founders in the sample built both a U.S. and a non-U.S. unicorn and are counted in both columns. Education records are restricted to study entries at universities, which excludes people who worked at a university rather than studied there. Only education started before the unicorn was founded qualifies. A business master’s is a master’s degree whose primary field is Accounting, Business, Finance, Management or Marketing; Economics and Public Administration are excluded, as are engineering degrees that carry a secondary management tag. MBA holders are counted as MBA holders even where they hold a second business degree.

School rankings include schools with at least five founders. A founder with degrees from two schools counts at each, so column totals exceed the number of founders.

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Ilya Strebulaev is the David S. Lobel Professor of Private Equity and Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he founded and directs the Stanford GSB Venture Capital Initiative. He is the author of The Venture Mindset and a leading researcher on venture capital, private equity, and startup founders, drawing on a dataset covering thousands of unicorns and the people behind them. Visit his Substack here.

DON’T MISS YOUR MBA PROBABLY WON’T HELP YOU BUILD A UNICORN. HERE’S THE DATA

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