B-Schools With The Most ‘Unicorn’ Founders

‘Unicorns’ are companies with a value which equals 1 billion dollars or more. In the last few years, such companies have become not as rare as they have been before. Sage (a software company headquartered in London) has collected information about which business schools can boast more unicorn-founding alumni.

In accordance with Poets and Quants, the results are somewhat predictable: the most MBA degree holders who have launched $1 billion startups hail from Harvard Business School, and there are 23 of them. A close second place belongs to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business with 19 entrepreneurs having graduated from there.

These two universities come very close, but they together have produced more unicorn founders than all other business schools out there. Many Stanford (51), Harvard (37) and Wharton (9) graduates have become co-founders and members of founding teams.

B-schools With Most Unicorn Founders Ranking

The top place, as was mentioned, belongs to Harvard with 23 graduates. The second is taken by Stanford (19), and the third by Wharton (9). The runners-up are as follows: INSEAD (5), WHU: Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Management (5), University of Southern California (4), UC Berkeley Haas (3), Columbia Business School (3), HEC Paris (3), Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta (3), UCLA Anderson (2), Brigham Young University (2), George Washington University (2), London Business School (2), Northwestern University Kellogg (2), and University of Illinois (2).

The university was considered the one producing the graduate if it was the last school they attended. For instance, if a unicorn founder got their MBA at Stanford, but then continued to study for a PhD at Harvard, Harvard would have the honor of producing them. Even founders with bachelor’s degrees count, like, for instance, Elon Musk, who received his economics degree in Wharton Business School. Even without undergraduate programs, Harvard and Stanford still managed to outrun universities with both graduate and undergraduate degrees, like UC Berkeley Haas and Wharton.

The survey does not include the number of startups launched by the alumni. Four of Wharton’s nine founders started a company together, while there are graduates who started multiple companies. Most unicorns (96) can be found in California and come from California universities compared to any other country. All in all, there are 144 unicorns in the USA.

Gender Diversity in Unicorn Founders

Interestingly, there are far more male unicorn founders (94%) than female (6%). It means that there are only seven women who have taken part in launching a unicorn company. All of them are Harvard or Stanford alumni. Their names are: Amy Pressman who graduated from Stanford and launched the Medallia company, Trae Vassallo (Stanford; Good Technology), Alexandra Wilkis Wilson (Harvard; Gilt Groupe), Alexis Maybank (Harvard; Gilt Groupe), Michelle Zatlyn (Harvard; Cloudflare), Tan Hooi Ling (Harvard; Grab) and Sarah Leary (Harvard; Nextdoor).

According to the survey, 60% of these founders have launched only one startup which grew into a unicorn company. A large part of unicorn founders are dealing in software and online commerce. Most of these startups obtained their $1 billion value after four years. The most companies became unicorns in 2015 (86 total). In 2016, though, the number of new unicorn companies went down to 41, which may be interpreted as the market getting on a halt.