3 ms·
TL;DR: Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Stanford, Oxford, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford, Harvard. It is difficult to tell if this is an indication that YC overwhe
by Archio 14y ago
TL;DR: Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Stanford, Oxford, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford, Harvard. It is difficult to tell if this is an indication that YC overwhelmingly prefers people from extremely prestigious name-brand universities, or only people from said universities have any chance of being "connected" enough to get into YC.
- rdl 14y agoI think it's more that several of the founders of YC were part of the MIT/Harvard community, so it grew from there. The participants in YC are much more diverse than the YC partnership.
- jedberg 14y agoIf you look at the credentials of all the YC founders, it is undeniable that there is a bias towards folks with prestigious degrees, but the question is, is that bias causal? There are plenty of successful founders without the degrees too, so at best I would say it is correlative.
- timr 14y ago"It is difficult to tell if this is an indication that YC overwhelmingly prefers people from extremely prestigious name-brand universities, or only people from said universities have any chance of being "connected" enough to get into YC." Neither. In our class (S12), there were founders from every background imaginable. I also know founders from other classes, and the same is true amongst that sample. If anything, YC founders seem a bit less "credentialed" than the Valley in general. To the extent that "name-brand" universities tend to graduate extremely smart, capable people, you'll find that they're over-represented in any sample of smart, capable people. But YC has no incentive to select for factors that don't correlate with outcome.
- imp 14y agoThere's a Case Western graduate in there too.
- psycho 14y agoHeh. Are people from these universities so smart or do other people think that they are smart because they graduated from these universities? Are YC startups good or does YC make them good? Who knows. Here's more university statistics though: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/29/study-startups-led-by-stanford-harvard-grads-lead-the-way-in-scoring-venture-capital-funding/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/29/study-startups-led-by-stanf...