Why is every successful tech founder an Ivy League graduate

Look at the top startups founded in the last couple of years, nearly every founder seems to come from an Ivy League school, Stanford, or MIT, often with a perfect GPA. Why is that? Does being academically brilliant matter more than being a strong entrepreneur in the tech world?

codegeek · 2 months ago

Most VCs (YC included) makes it clear that they invest in people/teams, not ideas or the product. Picking people to fund is mostly a gamble anyway. So a lot of VCs or funds try to maximize their changes of success by looking at indicators like Ivy league schools. It is an indicator if all else is equal. Think of it this way. Would you be more inclined to fund either:

Team A: Ivy leaguers with an unknown idea/product

Team B: No name people with an unknown idea/product or even a reasonable idea but too early to prove scale for VC funding.

So even though YC (and other VCs) doesn't reject people that not Ivy Leaguers (many have been funded), the bar is much higher for those people. It is the unfortunate reality. I personally don't see anything wrong with that. Every VC wants to maximize their chance of success in investing in startups which is already a gamble.

codingdave · 2 months ago

Because your filter of "top startups" likely already is filtering out all the bootstrapped success stories because "they are not startups". It is rejecting anything that succeeded via slow deliberate growth because they are not the "top", nor are they from the last couple of years. Your chosen filter shows you the people playing the VC game, and yes that game is mostly played by the same crowd who chooses the Ivy League.

rgoldfinger · 2 months ago

This is correct. Tech founders have famously never dropped out of school.

fghorow · 2 months ago

Not to mention attended hippie-dippie colleges in Oregon...

slater · 2 months ago

It's more the people you get to meet at said schools, than actual academic achievements (or lack thereof)

ilamont · 2 months ago

> Look at the top startups founded in the last couple of years, nearly every founder seems to come from an Ivy League school, Stanford, or MIT, often with a perfect GPA.

Is that true? If I were to comb through recent YC batches, the startups would be dominated by Ivy+ grads or dropouts?

Or are you talking about VC-funded startups and those covered by startup media?

Phlebsy · 2 months ago

Something missing is the confidence that comes from being perceived that way as well. You're a high performer at a high prestige/competitive school - you're going to feel more like you can do everything the other successful people from that school can do compared to someone from a no-pedigree state school who wouldn't have access to those role models or tracks to see what's possible and be more likely to just go with the flow and accept a safe job offer.

Even if we assumed that there was nothing special about the capabilities of people who finish Ivy League educations, that's still a powerful effect. Add in that they are either competitive enough or have well connected enough families to get into said school, and it's a multiplying effect on top.

dbuxton · 2 months ago

Not caused but correlated: doing something risky is much easier when you have something to fall back on - which I’d guess is a lot more common in the Ivies

Spooky23 · 2 months ago

It’s a social construct. The gatekeepers for money need to have some vetting of the founders. They have people they call at the big schools. The dude from SUNY Binghamton is an unknown unless someone can vouch.

The schools are super selective for people who are smart and can execute the strategy to get in, which is similar to sone aspects of the types of business VC want to incubate.