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Want to boost your chances of building a unicorn? Be a guy and go to Stanford University

Ready to be shaken to your very core? A new study reveals that unicorn founders are overwhelmingly men and that Stanford University produces more of them than any other institute of higher education.

Shocked! We’re shocked!

This will no doubt shatter the image of Silicon Valley as a bastion of equality and merit-based success. But let’s do our best to soldier on in any case.

The study of startups with valuations over $1 billion was conducted by Sage, a U.K.-based cloud accounting service, and Verve Search, a digital marketing firm. The data was pulled from a wide range of sources, including TechCrunch, Crunchbase, CB Insights, and VB Profiles, among others.


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When it comes to universities, Stanford had the most graduates who became founders of unicorns. If you need a Plan B, try Harvard as your unicorn safety school:

  • Stanford University: 51
  • Harvard University: 37
  • University of California: 18
  • Indian Institute of Technology: 12
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 9
  • University of Pennsylvania: 9
  • University of Oxford: 8
  • Tel Aviv University: 7
  • Cornell University: 6
  • University of Southern California: 6
  • University of Waterloo: 6
  • INSEAD: 5
  • WHU: 5
  • University of Michigan: 5
  • Brigham Young University: 5

When it comes to gender, well….

Unicorn League by Sage UK

unicorn-league