Before Jensen Huang co -founder NvidiaHe was a dishwasher in Denny’s, but most of the founders of the unicorn begin in much more predictable places. The Venture Capital Stanford GSB initiative team and I analyzed 2791 founders for 1110 American unicorns supported by VC to grasp their skilled origin.
The data show that they have developed their skills in technological giants, elite universities and even military organizations. Four out of 10 unicorn founders who had previously founded other firms and the previous ones Israeli defense forces The staff are 3 times more prone to build American unicorns than the average.
From employees to entrepreneurs
1 / 4 of the unicorn founders previously worked in scientific research or technology development. Another 22% have already led firms as general directors, and 9% served as CTO before starting their unicorns.
Engineers (21%), software engineers (17%) and product managers (14%) normally complement the roles in the background-a clear pattern showing that leadership, technology and marketing skills are the foundation of the success of the founder of the Unicorn.
This skilled background is significant. The data show that the founders of the Unicorn previously worked in 6,09 different organizations, but only 33 entities produced 15 or more future unicorns builders. This is no accident where the future unicorn builders come from – almost half of the 33 best organizations that produce them, they’d VC financing themselves.
Technological giants function a particularly effective training basis. Google himself produced 96 unicorn founders, and then Microsoft (64) I IBM (42).
Elite universities also function as a powerful start, z Stanford (43 founders), WITH (40) i Harvard (33) running a package (they are for the founders who worked at these universities, not those that studied). Financial powers corresponding to Goldman Sachs (27 founders) and government agencies, including NASA (19 founders) Fill the photo.
Serial Entrepreneurship: Practice makes perfect
Our research shows that 40% of the founders of the unicorns had previously founded other firms, and 60% of unicorns have at least one serial entrepreneur in their founding team. The path to the success of a billion dollars often includes previous ventures-and successes and failures.
Despite this, most (60%) of the unicorn founders hit their first attempt. Brian CheskyFor example, a co -founder Airbnb Without previous experience as a founder.
1 / 4 needed a second attempt, like Jason Citron who created Discord After the first construction of a social playing platform for mobile games. Another 9% were successful in the third attempt – including Eric Lywho was a co -founder LinkedIn After starting two B2B firms – while 6% required 4 or more projects before reaching the status of unicorn.
We also found interesting patterns in various industries: financial services firms show the highest indicator of serial entrepreneurs (61%), while healthcare unicorns have less earlier founders (31%) in comparison with IT technology (38%).
Unexpected unicorn factories: military and government experience
Some of the most intriguing discoveries come from less obvious sources of unicorn talents.
The founders with the experience of Israel’s defense forces are 3.1 times more likely than the average for building American firms value a billion dollars. Other government and research organizations also exceed expectations, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (2.1x), the USA Air Force (1.7x) i Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1.6x).
These organizations probably arouse useful skills that are transferred to entrepreneurship – strategic pondering, mission focus, technological knowledge and performance under pressure.
Path to success: what the background of the founder tell us
If you dream of establishing one other unicorn, our discoveries provide a mix of excellent news and control of reality. On the one hand, some skilled origin clearly correlate with the success of building a unicorn. Time in the best technology firms, elite universities or specific government organizations seem to make sure useful preparation for future founders.
At the same time, a significant percentage of founders who have been successful after many attempts shows that sturdiness is necessary. For those whose current projects do not work as expected, the data suggest that learning from failure and re -attempt results in final success.
Our research paints a clear picture of what it is advisable build a unicorn. Yes, where you worked, they matter – many founders come from Google and Stanford – but the door is not closed to others who gain relevant experience and do not hand over after defeat.
Note on methodology and sources
In this study, we define unicorns as supported by American firms that have achieved a confirmed valuation value $ 1 billion after a statement in the private basic round or had a liquidity event (corresponding to IPO or takeover) with a confirmed valuation value $ 1 billion in the meantime 1997 and 2021. Crunchbase AND TechCrunchin addition to from data sets that report details about private events and liquidity, corresponding to Crunchbase, Pitchbook AND Venturesource. Then we manually confirmed and checked the data on the location and financing to make a decision to incorporate each company from our last unicorns list. This process caused a total of 1110 unicorns. For each unicorn, we also identified a peer company supported by VC, which raised its first round of the undertaking in the same yr. We call a sample of such peers with a random sample. For each company in unicorn samples and random we identified the founders and co -founders (we use the “founder” and “co -founder” from all the abovementioned sources, LinkedIn, public applications and many others. In total, we identified and confirmed 4975 founders (various data exercises can use the support of this data).