Who Are You? Part 2: Gender and Education Backgrounds of Venture-Backed Internet Startups
California (11 percent), Pennsylvania (9 percent), Massachusetts (8 percent), and Illinois (4 percent). About 5 percent of the founders were educated in India. The report also shows the top 13 undergraduate schools, led by Cornell and Stanford, which each had 11 college graduates among the startup founders. The Ivy League and schools with strong engineering programs also are well-represented. But all 13 of the top undergraduate schools account for 79 founders, or less than half of the 165 founders surveyed—which means there is a long tail of schools that the other 86 attended (assuming that they even graduated from college).
Undergraduate education
—Nearly half of the founders with graduate degrees attended universities in just two states, Massachusetts (24 percent) and California (21 percent). Harvard—primarily MBA graduates—tops the list of graduate schools, with 17 graduates among the
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.
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