A team at Stanford found that startup founders affiliated with the University of Cincinnati and the University of Utah were more likely to reach a billion-dollar valuation or more, or unicorn status, with their startups. These schools are more likely than Ivy League universities to produce a unicorn, according to the report.
Ilya Strebulaev, the David S. Lobel Professor of Private Equity and Professor of Economics at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, revealed that US startup founders who studied or worked at University of Cincinnati they were 3.3 times more likely to find a unicorn than average. Strebulaev's own workplace, Stanford, was 1.6 times the average for comparison.
General view of the University of Cincinnati campus. Photo by Michael Hickey/Getty Images
“We began by determining the educational and professional background for the founders of 1,110 US-based VC-backed unicorns and 1,028 randomly selected VC-backed companies,” Strebulaev he wrote in a LinkedIn post. Of this group, 1,081 unicorns and 961 random start-ups had at least one founder associated with a university.
Related: Here are 3 strategies startup founders can use to approach high-impact disagreements
The Stanford Graduate School of Business Venture Capital Initiative team, which Strebulaev founded inthen looked at which universities were connected to the unicorns and which were in the random sample group to determine which were more likely to be connected to the unicorn founders.
The University of Cincinnati, for example, was linked to 1% of the 1,081 unicorns the team looked at and 0.3% of the 961 randomly sampled startups. Dividing these two rates yields 3.3, or, in Strebulaev's words, “the odds ratio for producing a unicorn.”
The University of Utah had an odds ratio of 3.2. Yale and Vanderbilt followed with a ratio of 2.0. UC Berkeley was 1.5.
Related: Report: Majority of Recent College Graduates Landing Jobs That Don't Require Degrees
The study's findings contradict previous work by the team that looked at the same question. Three months ago, Strebulaev recognized that Yale, Columbia, and Stanford had the top odds ratios using the same methodology. The difference in results could be due to which companies were in the random selection group this time.
A notable unicorn from the University of Cincinnati is Astronomer, which surpassed a billion-dollar valuation in 2022. Ry Walker, co-founder of the startup, recently served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the UC Venture Lab.
Here are the top 5 schools with the highest odds of producing a unicorn:
- University of Cincinnati — 3.3 times more likely
- University of Utah — 3.2
- Yale and Vanderbilt — 2.0
- Columbia, BYU and Stanford — 1.6
- University of California, Berkeley — 1.5.
click here for Strebulaev's full announcement of the analysis.
