Click here for the Techcrunch post, October 24, 2009. by
Vivek Wadhwa
What makes entrepreneurs successful is the education, not the
school. It’s the same in India and China. India’s IITs and China’s
Fudan University (their “Ivy League” schools) don’t hold any monopoly
on graduating tech stars.
In the first research project,
we looked at the background of 317 immigrants who started tech
companies. We were surprised to learn that Delhi University graduated
twice as many Silicon Valley company founders as did IIT Delhi. And
that both Osmania and Bombay University trumped nearly all of the IITs.
China’s Tianjin University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University graduated
more founders than Fudan or Tsinghua.
These were immigrants, and we weren’t sure if it would be the same
with American schools. So we looked into the educational background of American tech company founders.
We found that the 628 U.S.-born tech founders we surveyed received
their education from 287 unique universities. Almost every major U.S.
university was represented. The top ten institutions in this group
accounted for only 19 percent of the entire sample. In other words, 81%
of the tech company founders came from “regular” schools. To make my
colleagues at Harvard feel better (and to keep my job),
I’ll acknowledge that the Ivies represented 8% of the sample even
though those schools only graduate 1.6% of American students.
Then we broadened our research and looked into the backgrounds of the founders of 549 successful businesses
across a set of high-growth industries. The proportion of Ivy-Leaguers
was even smaller (about 6% of the sample). We also found that MBA’s
tended to start companies sooner after graduation (13 years) than
bachelors degree holders (17 years). And both these groups were quicker
to the startups than PhD’s – who typically waited 21 years from the
time they graduated to start their ventures. That’s right, tech company
founders aren’t spring chickens.
Also, we found that Computer Science/IT grads were faster than MBA’s
(13 years vs. 15 yrs) and the applied science majors (20 years)…
