Hey I'm Lee, the author of this article. I think there are a lot of fair callouts about controlling for major, sample size, selection bias, and others, so I collected my response to those concerns here: https://blog.ledwards.com/methods-for-determining-startup-de... and linked to this follow-up article at the top of the original. Really appreciate the comments and feedback, and happy to hear more.
I'm sure this won't satisfy everyone, but I wanted to do this analysis now instead of in 40 years, so I had to work with the data I do have. I think this is enough to show at least directionally that Olin is doing a reasonably good job at producing startup founders, though as I raise myself at the end of this article, we won't know for sure until we have some exits and long-term value creation in the future.
The college encourages an entrepreneurial attitude, but is not focused explicitly on getting alumni to start companies. But you do see a lot of Olin alumni joining early startups as well as big companies. Google was the largest employer of Olin alumni in the first two years (2006-2007), mostly through the new-at-the-time APM program. A few years later, it was Microsoft. Now Pivotal is high up the list. You also see Olin alumni joining early startups that they did not found as early employees (Square, AirBnB, Adroll off the top of my head).
I have looked into controlling for major, but I would need to rework all the data from the Pitchbook report, and I don't have their primary data sources. Surely some founders from those schools come from non-technical majors. If I remove them from the denominator, I'd need to remove them from the numerator as well.
I did start looking at this though, and I don't think it would change the outcome much. At MIT, almost 90% of alumni are in science, math, engineering, and business. At Stanford, it's more than half. So that would change the difference from something like 5x to maybe 2x, and that's without removing the founders of those colleges with non-technical degrees from their list of founders. Harvard might be the more interesting one, where I suspect technical and business degrees are not a clear majority.
But given the wide margin, I don't expect this would change the order of the ranking at all, maybe just my (intentionally) clickbaity headline.
when you say "Google was the largest employer of Olin alumni" do you mean like, what, 3 to 10 people? Its too small to even compare to Stanford. Its apples to appleseeds.
I mean it sounds like a great school, kudos to the staff, but its a silly comparison.
Thanks, Dan. Great article as well. Love the title ;)
Yeah, I think my basic message is to be a little more human in your dealings at networking events. In that way, I think we're both talking about the same thing. I'm embarrassed to admit that before I knew any better, I could have been Percy in your story. Thanks for the good read.
That's really good advice for anyone, but particularly for people who haven't already built a large network yet. I find that as my network grows, I can often get a personal introduction to people I want to meet through a friend. This is actually one thing I do like LinkedIn for. A coworker pointed out that I skipped over this very effective use of LinkedIn when I bashed it with a larger hammer than necessary.
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