Most chief executives of heavily funded startups have an advanced degree from prestigious universities, according to Crunchbase, who looked at US universities with the most graduates who became CEOs of startups funded in the past three years that have raised at least USD 100 million in venture financing.
As expected, Stanford and Harvard topped the list, together with top-ranked business schools. However, CEOs of companies in this dataset have quite diverse backgrounds from multiple continents and various regions of the US.
Crunchbase looked at 193 private US companies that have raised USD 100 million or more and closed a VC round in the past three years. Here are the results:
Findings show that the educational backgrounds of these CEOs are not hugely different from the broader population of funded US startups. For heavily funded startups, there is a high proportion of business school degrees.
When it comes to the most heavily funded startups in the US (20 companies), the educational mix is quite diverse: