Here are the colleges that have produced the most founders of billion-dollar startups
If you want to want to create a billion dollar start-up, consider attending Stanford University.
The Stanford, California-based university has educated a whopping 51 individuals who then went on to found startups that became worth at least a billion dollars, according to Sage, an accounting software company.
These companies are often referred to as "unicorns" to denote how rare it is to accomplish such a feat. There are a few more than 200 worldwide, and the list continues to grow.
The biggest, like Uber, Airbnb, and Snap Inc., are worth tens of millions of dollars.
It's perhaps unsurprising that Stanford tops the list. The school is in close proximity to Silicon Valley, a name practically synonymous with "startup."
Looking down the list, however, there may be some lesser-known schools that have educated multiple successful startup founders. Take a look:
- Stanford University (US): 51
- Harvard University (US): 37
- University of California (US): 18
- Indian Institute of Technology US): 12
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US): 9
- University of Pennsylvania (US): 9
- University of Oxford (England): 8
- Tel Aviv University (Israel): 7
- Cornell University (US): 6
- University of Southern California (US): 6
- University of Waterloo (Canada): 6
- INSEAD (France): 5
- WHU (Germany): 5
- University of Michigan (US): 5
- Brigham Young University (US):5
Verve Search identified 242 startups that were worth $1 billion or more as of December 2016. The company credited the alma mater as the university where each founder had worked toward or attained their most advanced degree.
Stanford's alumni founders include LinkedIn founders Allen Blue, Eric Ly and Konstantin Guericke. Harvard's include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg (though he didn't graduate), Hulu founder Jason Kilar, and Airbnb founder Nathan Blecharczyk. And the University of California's alumni include Uber founder Travis Kalanick, GoPro founder Nicholas Woodman, and Lyft founder Logan Green.