💸 The Half-Trillion Dollars of Enterprise Value Produced by Liberal Arts Colleges You’ve Never Heard Of
University Rankings for Founders, Liberal Arts Colleges, & Our 2021 Findings for the Claremont Colleges
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It’s a new year, and with a new year comes the annual Pitchbook University Rankings: Top 50 Colleges for Founders. For those who aren’t familiar, Pitchbook, an industry news outlet that covers the private equity and M&A landscape, produces an annual report on which colleges produce the most successful entrepreneurs. The report tracks publicly available metrics including founder count, company count, capital raised, and YoY rank changes for the top 50 undergraduate programs and top 25 MBA programs.
Because Pitchbook’s ranking is only based on the total number of founders who graduated from a given university, small institutions like liberal arts colleges are disadvantaged on this list. For example, just two liberal arts colleges made it to the top 50 list this past year, #26 Dartmouth (4,170 undergraduate students, 477 entrepreneurs) and #50 Trinity College (2,200 undergraduate students, 302 entrepreneurs). Compare these to #7 University of Michigan (31,329 undergraduate students, 921 entrepreneurs) or #18 USC (19,606 undergraduate students, 584 entrepreneurs)¹.
I’m a proud liberal arts graduate of the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of seven colleges, five undergraduate (Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, Pomona, Scripps), and two graduate schools (Claremont Graduate University, Keck Graduate Institute) located in Claremont, California, about 45 minutes outside Los Angeles. I’ve worked in startups and venture capital since my graduation in 2013, and have seen countless peers pursue and find success as founders, technologists, and investors. A year ago, I enlisted a team² to investigate how the Claremont Colleges alumni community performs in the world of venture capital startups since sources like Pitchbook seemed to be lacking, especially for liberal arts colleges.
In June 2020, we published our findings, benchmarking the performance of Claremont Colleges alumni with the 2019 Pitchbook data. We focused on the undergraduate institutions since they comprise the bulk of the Claremont Colleges and the flagship Pitchbook data set. Our findings can be summarized in the following tables:
While the entrepreneur count (202) had disadvantaged the Claremont Colleges from making an appearance in Pitchbook’s top 50 report, our data set illustrated that the consortium was a top-five contender by venture dollars raised for the period ($26.0B), ranking #4 after Stanford ($37.8B), Harvard ($32.7B), and Berkeley ($28.6B).
On a per-company and per-founder basis, which we find to be a useful metric that controls for the size of the alumni population across the respective institutions, Claremont ranked as the #1 most prolific undergraduate alumni community by venture dollars raised. On average, $138M per company was raised, compared to the next closest contender Harvard at $37M.
While imperfect in other ways, we find aggregate venture dollars raised, and per company venture dollars raised, to be meaningful methodologies for identifying ‘successful’ alumni communities. Read on to see how the Claremont entrepreneurial community performed in 2020 and 2021.
2021 Rankings: Deeper Analysis
With the new 2021 Pitchbook data recently released covering the last two years, we wanted to publish a more in-depth account and some refreshed statistics that benchmark the Claremont data set to other top universities.
Below is a table that benchmarks the raw venture dollars raised by Claremont alumni founders to other US universities from 2006 to 2021:
Claremont alumni raised a staggering $41.1B in venture capital funding between January 1, 2006 — October 31, 2021. That’s an additional $15.1B in the last two years. To put this number into perspective, Claremont graduate and leveraged buy-out pioneer Henry Kravis could throw $10K at you every day, and you and Henry would be playing catch for 11,260 years (or until KKR ran out of funds!) before you’d raise $41.1B. The largest contributors on a venture dollars raised basis are e-cigarette business Juul ($15.1B), founded by Pomona alumnus Adam Bowen, self-driving technology company Cruise Automation ($13.1B), founded by Claremont McKenna alumnus Dan Kan, and biomanufacturing company Resilience (~$1.3B), co-founded by Claremont McKenna alumnus Drew Oetting.
On a raw basis, Claremont alumni were the 5th most prolific undergraduate alumni community in the United States by venture dollars raised. It’s rarified air up there — only five US universities cracked the $40B mark.
Below is a table that benchmarks the per capita venture dollars raised by Claremont alumni founders to other US universities:
On a ‘per capita’ basis, Claremont continues to lead with the #1 spot for venture dollars raised on average per founder. Claremont founders raised $152.2M on average compared to other top 10 US universities which raised in the mid-$30M to mid-$40M range on average.
Astonishingly, even if you wholly removed Claremont’s largest outlier, Juul, we would still rank #1 on a ‘per capita’ basis with $96.5M raised per founder and #11 on raw dollars raised basis with $26B compared to other US universities. Claremont alumni have a track record of producing multiple, enormous outliers.
Below is a table that benchmarks the raw venture dollars raised by female Claremont alumni founders to other US universities:
It turns out that Claremont’s female alumni base outperforms as well. Female Claremont alumni raised $2.7B over this period, which makes female Claremont alumni the 8th most prolific US university system by venture dollars raised on a raw basis.
Below is a table that benchmarks the per capita venture dollars raised by female Claremont alumni founders to other US universities:
On a per-capita basis, Claremont female alumni also take the #1 spot. Female Claremont alumni on average raised $90.9M, which is about triple that of the other contenders who come in at the $30M range.
Interestingly, it’s an entirely different set of outliers than Juul, Cruise, or Resilience within the female-founded company pool that drives these numbers. For Claremont, those companies are genome editing company Intellia Therapeutics ($685M) founded by Pomona alumnus Jennifer Doudna; financial management platform for SMB owners Honeybook ($498M) founded by Pomona alumnus Shadiah Sigala; and feature management platform LaunchDarkly ($330M) founded by Harvey Mudd alumnus Edith Harbaugh (and fellow HMC grad John Kodumal). Female alumni from the Claremont Colleges are regularly producing some of the largest, outlying outcomes in technology.
Finally, per the stat we reference in our title, we conducted a further analysis of the historical market cap and enterprise value created by Claremont alumni. This isn’t a statistic that Pitchbook gathers, so there’s no peer group to benchmark against. We also conducted this with the entirety of Claremont alumni-founded companies, not just those that raised venture dollars between 2006–2021:
We found public company market caps and private company market caps to total $465.0B, and inclusive of acquisition value, to be $484.0B. Because publicly available data on private company valuations lags real valuations, we are very comfortable standing by a total enterprise value that exceeds half of one trillion dollars.
The largest outlier by market cap of all time? That’s networking pioneer Cisco, founded by Claremont Graduate University ’77 alumnus Sandy Lerner. At the time of this writing, Cisco’s market cap stands at $240B. Earlier mentioned Juul (~$38B) and Cruise Automation (~$19B) make significant contributions to this stat, as do tax automation business Avalara, founded by Claremont McKenna alumnus Scott McFarlane, tissue-regeneration company Biosplice Therapeutics (~$12B) founded by Pomona graduate Osman Kibar, and code-hosting leader GitHub (acquired by Microsoft for $7.5B) founded by Harvey Mudd drop-out Tom Preston-Werner.
Some Closing Thoughts, and a Shout Out to the Next Generation of Female Entrepreneurs
We conducted this research and published this article to shine a spotlight on the incredible entrepreneurial success of Claremont’s liberal arts graduates:
- Claremont graduates rank among the top handful of alumni communities globally on a venture dollars raised basis, having raised $41.1B since 2006. We’re the 5th most prolific alumni community in the United States for this period.
- Claremont graduates are head and shoulders above any alumni community in the world on a per-company basis, even when removing our most significant outlier Juul. On average, Claremont-founded companies have raised $152.2M per company since 2006.
- Female Claremont graduates rank among the top handful of alumni communities globally, having raised $2.7B since 2006. We’re the 8th most prolific alumni community and the 1st on a per-company basis, on average raising $90.9M for this period.
In particular, we want to encourage the next generation of female alumni to swing big. Sandy Lerner, Jennifer Doudna, Edith Harbaugh, Shadiah Sigala — these women, who strolled the same quads as you, learned under the same professors and enjoyed the same peer group — are solving some of the most consequential problems of our time. Just 32 female Claremont alumni founded technology businesses over the last fifteen years. Granted, it’s well-known that female alumni face more significant challenges when raising capital and navigating careers as founders — but we are excited to emphasize and publish writing that spotlight these success stories.
We hope this article, and others that we publish in Between the Lines, will encourage more Claremont alumni and liberal arts graduates to consider careers in technology and take the leap as founders. After all, it’s the year of the #Claremonster.
A big and sincere thank you to Clay Spence and Daniel Shi for providing helpful feedback and comments as we drafted this post.
[1] Undergraduate enrollment numbers are for fall 2020 and are drawn from US News’ profiles on the respective colleges: Dartmouth, Trinity College, UC Berkeley, USC. Pitchbook’s methodology is to include companies that received their first round of venture funding from January 1, 2006, and October 31, 2021.
[2] In early 2020, I enlisted a group of Claremont undergrads (Josh Tatum, Adhi Venkatraman, Avi Gupta, Hank Harvego, Jess Fang) to help me analyze the Claremont Colleges entrepreneurial community. We spent months scraping publicly available sources and collecting data on founders’ educational backgrounds from publicly available and primary sources, just like Pitchbook’s methodology. Our findings were so compelling that Josh authored his senior thesis using our data set, So, You Want to be an Entrepreneur: Potential Factors that Lead to Founder and Startup Success. His thesis went on to receive several awards in the CMC economics department. In June 2020, Josh and I, now working more closely together following his graduation, began publishing a weekly newsletter, Between the Lines (BTL), covering the Claremont entrepreneurship ecosystem.
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