[chirau]

Whether venture-backed or not:

A startup does not always equal a business.

Unfortunately we now live in a mindset where the ability to raise capital is the yardstick of success. The yardstick of a business, however, has never changed. It's profit.

How many of these ventures are actually profitable? Not to hate on the school, but if the companies are not profitable then they are basically being taught how to raise capital, not how to run a business. They could be producing Clinkles and Juiceros. Remember that VC funding is also just a gamble that they may make it. Statistically most VC-backed companies don't make it. So that alone should not be a measure of success.

I think a better stat would be percentage of startups out of a school that make it to profitability. Take the NBA 3-point approach. You have to have a minimum number of attempts to be considered. Likewise, a school would have to have a minimum number of startups to come out of it. Then from there you measure the percentage of those startups that are profitable after some agreed upon average age.

[pataoAoC]

Amusingly, I'm an Olin grad with a profitable lifestyle business that I started, so I wasn't included in this stat. I wholeheartedly agree with you on goals and values. Fortunately, Olin isn't a "VC startup factory", but that could have easily been the case from the data presented in the article.