You're not too far off. There are two very different populations at Princeton: undergrads and grad students barely recognize each other's existence, much less

You're not too far off. There are two very different populations at Princeton: undergrads and grad students barely recognize each other's existence, much less talk with one another, and therefore don't found with one another. The undergrads are constantly, constantly marauded by recruiters from wall street and consulting firms. Many of the rest are trying to get into med or law school. The populations in the hard sciences, engineering, math, and comp sci are quite small. Most of those are in fields which don't found companies out of undergrad much -- molecular biology, for example. And of the hard sciences, the dominant cultural influence is from foreign students holding international science Olympiad medals. It draws the fire from the notion of founding a startup. The rest are grad students. Some of these do found startups, but they're fewer, and farther from capital, and often quite set on an academic path. Plus, unlike at MIT or Stanford or Berkeley, there is, for some reason, an urgency on the part of the administration to get you graduated by your fifth year. Don't ask me why. Also, it's just not as strong of an engineering school in most of the disciplines or fields that are startuppy. Even within comp sci, there are mostly people studying large systems, and theory, and parallelization, and security, and computer science policy, and compilers, and so on. Not so many in HCI. And since most startups succeed where they can fill a before unarticulated need, that hurts them. Finally, it's a little bit of the product of the admissions department. Many people are admitted based on extracurriculars which look good on paper, but neither stretch one's abilities, nor are particularly novel (if they were, they'd be hard for admissions to understand), nor are particularly technical. Bleeding heart stuff. A lot of the startups that I saw come out of Princeton (which friends got involved in) are either vaguely defined environmental/political websites, or connected to academia in some way. Not to say Princetonians don't have the chops: both Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt came from the EECS department.