[madamelic]

I would be very curious how this landscape changes when you don't consider VC funding as a necessary part of being a startup. I want to see how demographics change due to funding method.

Another interesting point, and this is likely outside the scope you are wanting to do, is to do democraphics -> positive personal financial outcome (ie: people who successfully landed it). The past few years has shown it isn't difficult to start a 'startup' but still difficult to get a positive financial outcome for the people who founded it. I am not saying it will change or one group is better, just curious to see how the demographics hold or if all the "elite school" and "elite employer" ends up washing out where it becomes a coinflip.

From my personal experience, people who went to "elite schools" and/or "elite employers" for an extended period aren't as good of a fit as people who are more 'underdog' background (more startup experience, no big school name or maybe even any college, etc). The Harvard / etc junk in my opinion is just Zuckerbergs/Gate overfitting by VCs (some are great, some are awful; essentially the same as any other school).

[keiferski]

You'd probably have far more 40-50 somethings with a couple decades of experience in the industry their startup is in, who raise funding from co-workers/customers/family members/former employers and not institutions. At that point, your 20 years of experience in the field will outweigh any Ivy League degrees.

[p1esk]

Got data to support your claim?

[keiferski]

Among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, we find that the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old. Why might this be? Although there are many other factors that may explain the age advantage in entrepreneurship, we found that work experience plays a critical role. Relative to founders with no relevant experience, those with at least three years of prior work experience in the same narrow industry as their startup were 85% more likely to launch a highly successful startup.

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

[JumpCrisscross]

> how this landscape changes when you don't consider VC funding as a necessary part of being a startup

Unicorns are defined by scalability. There are scalable opportunities with low barriers to entry. But they tend to be hypercompetitive and thus a better domain for small business than unicorns. The moment you have barriers to entry and economies of scale you have a decisive advantage for the players with more capital. As such, when talking about unicorns, VC is a necessary condition. (VC firms may not be.)

[yobbo]

Elite schools could just mean "otherwise wealthy enough to take risks".

[pragma_x]

This is how I interpret things. People from that kind of background are also notoriously well-connected, so attempting a startup early or mid career isn't going to damage their ability to go back to the job market. For the rest of us, that would take some explaining at the interview table.

[codingwagie]

The bet is that if they fund 20 Harvard grads, one of them might be like Gates. Even if the rest are duds. The math still kind of works out, they need an outlier.

[gunapologist99]

> The math still kind of works out

How many Gates are there in a typical Harvard grad cohort? Are 5% of Harvard grads a Gates?

If we're looking at lightning strikes, it seems like we should look at some of the most successful tech CEO's in history, in no particular order.

Gates & Zuck - Harvard (Microsoft and Facebook; both dropped out by end of second year or earlier)

Larry Ellison (Oracle, third richest man in the world in 2000's and currently 9th richest) - dropped out of Univ Illinois and Chicago

Larry Page, Sergein Brin (Google, dropped out of Stanford)

Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX/X/PayPal/etc, richest man in world, attended Queen's and then transferred to ivy league U Penn, one of the very few that completed a degree, BS in both Physics and Econ)

Jeff Bezos (Amazon, second richest in world, earned BSE in EE/CS from Princeton, summa cum laude)

Steve Jobs (Apple, dropout Reed College)

Of course, these numbers have such a high p-value that really it amounts to nothing more than a guess or, at best, a hypothesis, and I get that you're just suggesting that those who both get admitted to Harvard and actually complete a full education there have much higher than average rates of being successful, but it seems that the extreme ends of such a graph end up being counter-intuitive, because:

From a very quick review of an admittedly hand-picked assortment of the very small number of "most" successful tech CEO's (whatever that might mean), we can identify a few common characteristics:

1. most did attend a university of varying quality.

2. A minority attended an elite school.

3. most did not complete even their second year.

There are a lot of things that can be read into this, but it does seem to be borne out across most less-regulated industries: founders tend to be smart enough to get into university but perhaps too impatient to stay in for the duration, but leaders of older companies (such as larger and public companies) tend to have at least a four-year degree, although I don't have any hard data about this (particularly because there seems to be a dearth of data for "successful" startup founders outside of the VC world, for any meaning of the word "success".)

[renewiltord]

Page and Brin dropped out of a Ph D program. They have Masters degrees.

[gunapologist99]

Excellent point, thanks for the correction!