Before Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia, he was a dishwasher at Denny’s, but most unicorn founders get their start in far more predictable places. The Stanford GSB Venture Capital Initiative team and I analyzed 2,791 founders behind 1,110 U.S.-based VC-backed unicorns to understand their professional backgrounds.
The data shows that they developed their skills at tech giants, elite universities and even military organizations. Four in 10 unicorn founders previously founded other companies, and former Israel Defense Forces personnel are 3x more likely to build U.S.-based unicorns than average.
From employees to entrepreneurs
One quarter of unicorn founders previously worked in scientific research or technology development. Another 22% had already led companies as CEOs, while 9% served as CTOs before launching their unicorns.
Engineers (21%), software engineers (17%) and product managers (14%) round out the most-common background roles — a clear pattern showing that leadership, technology and marketing skills form the foundation of unicorn founder success.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyavcandpe/
This professional background matters significantly. The data shows unicorn founders previously worked at 6,109 different organizations, but only 33 entities produced 15 or more future unicorn builders. It’s no coincidence where these future unicorn builders come from — almost half of the top 33 organizations that produce them had VC funding themselves.
Tech giants serve as particularly effective training grounds. Google alone produced 96 unicorn founders, followed by Microsoft (64) and IBM (42).
Elite universities also function as powerful launchpads, with Stanford (43 founders), MIT (40) and Harvard (33) leading the pack (these are for founders who worked at these universities rather than those who studied). Financial powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs (27 founders) and government agencies including NASA (19 founders) complete the picture.
Serial entrepreneurship: Practice makes perfect
Our research shows that 40% of unicorn founders had previously started other companies, and 60% of unicorns have at least one serial entrepreneur on their founding team. The path to a billion-dollar success often involves previous ventures — both successes and failures.
Still, the majority (60%) of unicorn founders hit it big on their first attempt. Brian Chesky, for instance, co-founded Airbnb without any prior experience as a founder.
One quarter needed a second try, like Jason Citron who created Discord after first building a social platform for mobile games. Another 9% succeeded on their third attempt — including Eric Ly, who co-founded LinkedIn after starting two B2B firms — while 6% required four or more ventures before achieving unicorn status.
We also found interesting patterns across industries: financial services companies show the highest rate of serial entrepreneurs (61%), while healthcare unicorns have fewer prior founders (31%) compared to information technology (38%).
Unexpected unicorn factories: Military and government experience
Some of the most intriguing findings come from less obvious unicorn talent sources.
Founders with Israel Defense Forces experience are 3.1x more likely than average to build U.S.-based billion-dollar companies. Other government and research organizations also outperform expectations, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (2.1x), the US Air Force (1.7x) and The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1.6x).
These organizations likely instill valuable skills that transfer to entrepreneurship — strategic thinking, mission focus, technological expertise and performance under pressure.
The path to success: What founder backgrounds tell us
If you’re dreaming of founding the next unicorn, our findings deliver a mix of good news and reality checks. On the one hand, certain professional backgrounds clearly correlate with unicorn-building success. Time at top tech companies, elite universities or specific government organizations appears to provide valuable preparation for future founders.
At the same time, the significant percentage of founders who succeed after multiple attempts demonstrates that persistence matters. For those whose current ventures aren’t performing as hoped, the data suggests that learning from failure and trying again often leads to eventual success.
Our research paints a clear picture of what it takes to build a unicorn. Yes, where you worked matters — plenty of founders come from Google and Stanford — but the door isn’t closed to others who gain the right experience and don’t give up after failure.
Ilya Strebulaev is the foremost academic expert on venture capital. As the founder of the Venture Capital Initiative and a professor of private equity and finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a popular class on venture capital, his research has been widely published in leading academic journals and featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg and the Harvard Business Review. He frequently leads workshops and executive sessions for senior business and government leaders around the world and has consulted for companies and investors on the venture industry trends and corporate innovation. In 2023 he was named a Top Voice on LinkedIn. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyavcandpe/).
Note on methodology and sources
For this study, we define unicorns as VC-backed, U.S.-based companies that achieved a confirmed $1 billion-plus post-money valuation in a primary private round or had a liquidity event (such as an IPO or an acquisition) at a confirmed $1 billion-plus valuation between 1997 and 2021. To construct our unicorn list, we started with “unicorn candidates” from well-known sources such as Crunchbase and TechCrunch, as well as from datasets that report private funding round and liquidity event details, such as Crunchbase, PitchBook and VentureSource. We then manually confirmed and cross-checked the location and funding details to decide on the inclusion of each company in our final unicorn list. This process resulted in a total of 1,110 unicorns. For each unicorn we also identified a peer U.S.-based VC-backed company that raised its first venture round in the same year. We call the sample of such peers a random sample. For each of the companies in the unicorn and random samples we identified founders and co-founders (we use “founder” and “co-founder” interchangeably) from all the sources mentioned above, LinkedIn, public filings and many others. In total, we identified and confirmed 4,975 founders (different data exercises may use subsamples of this data).
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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