Who Are You? Charting the Demographics of Venture-Backed Internet Startups

Our friends at CB Insights, a New York information services firm that tracks investments in private companies, have been busy gathering new insights about the demographics of venture-backed Internet companies.

They’ve put together a report based on data about the founders of 165 early stage Internet companies that raised their first round of institutional venture capital funding (seed and Series A rounds) during the first six months of 2010. Today CB Insights is releasing Part 1, which focuses on the race, age, and experience of these startup founders, and plans to release Part 2, which focuses on the founders’ gender and education, later this week.

Much of the data the group came up with is unsurprising. The study found, for example, that an overwhelming number of Internet startup founders (87 percent) are white, which exceeds the 77 percent of the U.S. population that is white.

(The methodology here is worth a parenthetical note. In explaining how CB Insights determined the founders’ race and ethnicity, the firm says it was “driven algorithmically by data CB Insights has created on last names, which leverages U.S. Census Data in addition to several other sources. In cases where ethnicity or race was not conclusively provided by our algorithm, we employed human tagging [Human editors tagging photos for race]. In cases where we discuss ethnicity, these statistics reflect the founders’ ethnicities and not the country they were born in.”)

CB Insights says the rationale for conducting the

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.