In a recent essay, I argued that studying anything other than business would increase a prospective entrepreneur’s odds of startup success. This is the data behind that assertion.
A few things you should know:
I compiled the list of top-tier entrepreneurs in a highly unscientific way. I simply searched on Google for lists of famous entrepreneurs. That search yielded a few hundred names. I narrowed the list to only include household name people (Oprah, Steve Jobs) and companies (Comcast, Boeing). I narrowed the list further by omitting any founders that didn’t attend at least some college (goodbye Enzo Ferrari, Thomas Edison, and Jay-Z). This resulted in a list of 80 world-class startup founders.
The data on college majors by year comes straight from the US Dept of Education and should be pretty high quality.
In the graph titled College Majors of Top-tier Entrepreneurs, I’ve included a category called Biz school but… to distinguish between founders who (1) studied business and those that studied something else in the business school (like accounting); or (2) studied business but had a serious background in something else (like coding by age 15—yes, that’s a real one). In the correlation graph, however, I combined the pure business majors and those with an asterisk.
The calculation behind the graph titled College Major - Entrepreneurship Correlation is pretty simple. It’s merely the variation from the general discipline representation by the top-tier entrepreneur cohort. For example, Liberal Arts accounted for 32.6% of all degrees awarded between 1970 and 2018, but only 25.6% of the college majors within the top-tier founder cohort.
25.6 - 32.6
----------- = -22%
32.6
The number of Liberal Arts majors within the top-tier entrepreneurship cohort is 22% lower than expected, given the total number of Lib Arts degrees.
It’s worth noting here that many of the entrepreneurs in the list didn’t graduate college. I’ve included them in their declared (or demonstrated, for undeclared majors) discipline whether they finished a degree or not. Similarly, the government data was specifically degrees awarded, not majors declared, but it seems reasonable to assume the fraction of graduates with a certain degree will generally track the percent of total students declaring that major.
The list of entrepreneurs is below the charts. You can see the full data set if you’re interested. The list is ordered by company name in order to group co-founders together.
Please feel free to point out anywhere that I’ve made mistakes or done something dumb in my calculations. And, finally, be sure to let me know which entrepreneurs are missing from this list. Remember the criteria:
- Either the founder or the company has to have household-name status.
- The founder must have attended at least some college.
| Founder | Company | School | Major | Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brian Chesky | AirBnB | Rhode Island School of Design | Industrial design | STEM |
| Nathan Blecharczyk | AirBnB | Harvard | Computer Science | STEM |
| Jack Ma | Alibaba | Hangzhou Normal University (B.A.); Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (MBA.) | English (B.A.); MBA. | Lib Arts |
| Jeff Bezos | Amazon | Princeton University | engineering | STEM |
| Giorgio Armani | Armani | University of Milan | Medicine (dropped out) | STEM |
| Nolan Bushnell | Atari, Chuck E Cheese | University of Utah | Electrical engineering | STEM |
| Michael Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Johns Hopkins (BS); Harvard (MS) | Electrical Engineering (BS), MBA (MS) | STEM |
| William Boeing | Boeing | Yale University | Engineering (dropped out) | STEM |
| Mark Cuban | Broadcast.com | Indiana University | business administration | Business |
| Calvin Klein | Calvin Klein | Fashion Institute of Technology | fine arts | Lib Arts |
| Melanie Perkins | Canva | University of Western Australia | Communications, Psychology, and commerce | Other |
| Ted Turner | CNN | Brown University | Economics (was expelled before graduating) | Other |
| Phil Knight | Co-Nike | University of Oregon; Stanford University | journalism; master’s degree in business administration | Other |
| Ralph Roberts | Comcast | University of Pennsylvania | business | Business |
| Craig Newmark | Craigslist | Case Western Reserve University | computer science; master’s degree in computer science | STEM |
| Michael Dell | Dell | University of Texas (dropped out) | Pre-med | STEM |
| Tony Xu | DoorDash | University of California at Berkeley (B.S.); Stanford University (MBA) | Industrial engineering and operations research (B.S.); MBA | STEM |
| Drew Houston | Dropbox | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Computer science | STEM |
| Pierre Omidyar | eBay | Tufts University | computer science | STEM |
| Mark Zuckerberg | Harvard University (dropped out) | Psychology and computer science | STEM | |
| Fred Smith | FedEx | Yale University | economics | Other |
| James Park | Fitbit | Harvard University (dropped out) | Computer science | STEM |
| Dennis Crowley | Foursquare | Syracuse University (BS); NYU (MS) | Public Communications (BS); Professional Studies (MS) | Other |
| Bob Parsons | GoDaddy | University of Baltimore | accounting | Business |
| Sergey Brin | University of Maryland; Stanford University | mathematics and computer science; master’s degree in computer science | STEM | |
| Larry Page | University of Michigan (B.S.); Stanford University (M.S.) | Computer engineering (B.S.); computer science (M.S.) | STEM | |
| Andrew Mason | Groupon | Northwestern University | music | Lib Arts |
| Oprah Winfrey | Harpo Productions | Tennessee State University | speech and performing arts | Lib Arts |
| David Packard | Hewlett-Packard | Stanford University | general engineering; master’s degree in electrical engineering | STEM |
| Bill Hewlett | Hewlett-Packard | Stanford | electrical engineering (BS & MS) | STEM |
| Arianna Huffington | Huffington Post | Cambridge | Economics | STEM |
| Howard Hughes | Hughes Aircraft | Caltech | Math & Aeronautical Engineering | STEM |
| Kevin Systrom | Stanford | Management Science and Engineering | STEM | |
| Mike Krieger | Stanford | Symbolic Systems (BS & MS) | STEM | |
| Gordon Moore | Intel | University of California-Berkeley; California Institute of Technology | chemistry; doctorate in chemistry | STEM |
| Andy Grove | Intel | City College of New York (BS); Berkeley (PhD) | chemical engineering | STEM |
| Kenneth Cole | Kenneth Cole | Emory | Arts & Sciences | Lib Arts |
| Sal Khan | Khan Academy | MIT (BS); Harvard (MBA) | Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (BS) | STEM |
| Reid Hoffman | Stanford (BS), Oxford (MS) | Cognitive Science (BS), Philosophy (MS) | Lib Arts | |
| Logan Green | Lyft | UC Santa Barbara | Business economics | Other |
| J.W. Marriott* | Marriott Corporation | Weber College; University of Utah | history and political science | Lib Arts |
| Martha Stewart | Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia | Barnard College | history and architectural history | Lib Arts |
| Bill Gates | Microsoft | Harvard University (dropped out) | Pre-law | Lib Arts |
| Steve Wynn | Mirage & Wynn Resorts | University of Pennsylvania | English Literature | Lib Arts |
| Debbie Fields | Mrs Fields Cookies | Foothill College | [no major] | Other |
| Shawn Fanning | Napster | Northeastern University | Computer Science (dropped out) | STEM |
| Reed Hastings | Netflix | Bowdoin College; Stanford University | mathematics; master’s degree in computer science | STEM |
| Rupert Murdoch | News Corp | Oxford | Philosophy, Politics and Economics | Lib Arts |
| Tim Westergren | Pandora | Stanford | Political Science | Lib Arts |
| John Schnatter | Papa John’s | Ball State University | business | Business |
| Ben Silberman | Yale University | Political Science | Other | |
| Paul Sciarra | Yale University | Philosophy | Lib Arts | |
| Evan Sharp | University of Chicago (BS); Columbia University (MS) | History (BS), Architecture (MS) | Lib Arts | |
| Steve Huffman | University of Virginia | Computer Science | STEM | |
| Alexis Ohanian | University of Virginia | Commerce, History | Lib Arts | |
| Marc Benioff | Salesforce | University of Southern California | Business administration (but he was coding for money by age 15) | Business |
| Stewart Butterfield | Slack | University of Victoria (B.A.); University of Cambridge (M.A.) | Philosophy (B.A. & M.A.) | Lib Arts |
| Evan Spiegel | Snapchat | Stanford University (dropped out) | Product design | Other |
| Masayoshi Son | Softbank | University of California at Berkeley | Economics and computer science | STEM |
| Herb Kelleher | Southwest Airlines | Wesleyan University; New York University | English; Juris Doctor | Lib Arts |
| Sara Blakely | Spanx | Florida State University | Communications | Lib Arts |
| Daniel Ek | Spotify | Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden | Engineering | STEM |
| Howard Schultz | Starbucks | Northern Michigan University | Communications | Lib Arts |
| Patrick Collison | Stripe | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (dropped out) | Mathematics | STEM |
| Vinod Khosla | Sun Microsystems | IIT Delhi (BS); Carnegie Mellon (MS); Stanford (MBA) | Electrical Engineering (BS), Biomedical engineering (MS) | STEM |
| Ma Huateng (Pony Ma) | Tencent | Shenzhen University in China | Computer science | STEM |
| Elon Musk | Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX | University of Pennsylvania (B.A.); Stanford University (dropped out) | Physics (B.A.) and economics (B.A.); applied physics and material science | STEM |
| Travis Kalenik | Uber | UCLA | Computer Engineering | STEM |
| Kevin Plank | Under Armour | Maryland | Business Administration | Business |
| Vera Wang | Vera Wang Bridal House | Sarah Lawrence College | art history | Lib Arts |
| Sam Walton | Walmart | University of Missouri | economics | Other |
| Brian Acton | Stanford | Computer Science | STEM | |
| Jan Koum | San Jose State | Math & Computer Science (dropped out) | STEM | |
| Lars Rasmussen | Where 2 Technologies (Google Maps) | University of Aarhus (BS); University of Edinburgh (MS); Berkeley (PhD) | Computer Science | STEM |
| John Mackey | Whole Foods | UT Austin | philosophy | Lib Arts |
| Paul Graham | Y-Combinator | Cornell (BS); Harvard (MS, PhD) | Philosophy (BS); Computer Science (MS, PhD) | STEM |
| Jerry Yang | Yahoo! | Stanford University | electrical engineering; master’s degree in electrical engineering | STEM |
| Jeremy Stoppelman | Yelp | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (B.S); Harvard Business School (MBA) | Computer engineering (B.S.); MBA | STEM |
| Chad Hurley | YouTube | Indiana University of Pennsylvania | fine arts | Lib Arts |
| Steve Chen | YouTube | University of Illinois - Urbana Champlain | Computer Science | STEM |
| Jawed Karim | YouTube | University of Illinois - Urbana Champlain (BS); Stanford (MS) | Computer Science (BS & MS) | STEM |
brnt 2021-08-18
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