Who Are You? Part 2: Gender and Education Backgrounds of Venture-Backed Internet Startups
founders surveyed. The schools filling out the rest of the top six: Stanford (12); MIT (11); Emory University (3) Northwestern University (3); and NYU (3).
—Throughout the country, more startup companies are headed by founders with MBAs (55 percent) than by MS degrees (32 percent) or law degrees (9 percent). In New York, almost two-thirds of the startups surveyed have founders with MBAs—while the founders of 29 percent have law degrees. Throughout the country, the survey shows that founding teams with only MBA degrees (58 percent) received the highest median level of venture funding, at $2.8 million. Still, there were some interesting differences among the three biggest states (see chart).
MBA MS and Funding
—As for advanced degrees, nearly two-thirds of the startup companies have founding teams that include at lease one member with a master’s or doctorate. Among the states, Massachusetts makes the strongest showing for startup teams with advanced degrees, with 73 percent having at least one member with a master’s or doctorate. New York has the most founding teams in which the highest level of education is an undergraduate degree or less. In terms of venture capital raised, the founding teams in California with the highest level of education got a higher median level of funding, but there was such relationship between funding and education in New York and Boston.
What does it all mean? Perhaps some venture-backed Internet founders will give us their perspective in the comment section below.
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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