![]() University-affiliated accelerator programs.New pools of capital are also available that are specifically for student founders. There are four categories that I call special attention to: My bet is that traditional media will point a larger spotlight at student entrepreneurship going forward. StartU goes above and beyond to be a resource to founders they profile by helping to connect them with investors (they’re active at 12 universities), and run a podcast hosted by their Editor-in-Chief Johnny Hammond that is top notch. Justine and Olivia, the minds behind Accelerated, have a lot of street cred- they launched Stanford’s on-campus incubator Cardinal Ventures before landing as investors at CRV. Student founders have a number of new media resources to turn to. New email newsletters focused on student entrepreneurship like Justine and Olivia Moore’s Accelerated and Kyle Robertson’s StartU offer new channels for young founders to reach large audiences. For further reading, PitchBook produces an excellent report each year that tracks where all entrepreneurs earned their undergraduate degrees. As you can see later in this essay, there are a number of new ways students all around the country can tap into the startup ecosystem. This is not to say that great companies are not being built out of other universities, nor does it mean students can’t find resources outside a select number of schools. Some prospective students will even enroll in a university specifically for its reputation of churning out great entrepreneurs. Student founders are everywhere, but the highest concentration of venture-backed student founders can be found at just 5 universities. Based on venture fund portfolio data from the last six years, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, UPenn, and UC Berkeley have produced the highest number of student-founded companies that went on to raise $1 million or more in seed capital. Perhaps the best example of this that I could find is Drew Houston at Dropbox (~$9B valuation at IPO), who previously founded an edtech startup at MIT that, in his words, provided a: “great introduction to the wild world of starting companies.” Some of today’s most celebrated tech leaders built their first ventures while in school - even if some student startups fail, the critical first-time founder experience is an invaluable education in how to build great companies. A sample of the current generation of marquee companies founded on college campuses include Snap at Stanford ($29B valuation at IPO), Warby Parker at Wharton (~$2B valuation), Rent The Runway at HBS (~$1B valuation), and Brex at Stanford (~$1B valuation). ![]() Indeed, some of our most iconic founders are Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, both student entrepreneurs who launched their startups at Harvard and then dropped out to build their companies into major tech giants. Student entrepreneurs have long been an important foundation of the startup ecosystem. Many students wrestle with how best to learn while in school -some students learn best through lectures, while more entrepreneurial students like author Julian Docks find it best to leave the classroom altogether and build a business instead. First, let’s look at student founders and why they’re important. ![]()
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