Where do Unicorns 🦄 come from?
ANSWER: The majority of unicorns DID NOT come from elite universities and Big 5 Tech/Consulting. It seems like this data contradicts the news profiles of founders who get funded.
What’s up with that??
The Endeavor Insight team was thrilled to share our latest study on the career journeys of 200 top unicorn founders. Now that it's published, we wanted to give everyone a behind-the-scenes look at how we developed it.
No Single Road to Success
Endeavor has worked for more than 25 years to help founders in emerging markets scale up, and many of them have achieved unicorn status. We’ve seen how their life stories and career backgrounds vary from one another, and from what people might assume from the resumes of Silicon Valley founders. We came up with the Unicorn Founders Pathways project so we could better understand these journeys and see who was taking the “road less traveled” yet still reaching the same levels of success.
There are a lot of studies on entrepreneurship that focus on company-level data or aggregate industry trends. These approaches are helpful, but it’s difficult to uncover insights on high-growth founders without going directly to the source, which is why we decided to use founder-level data in our research.
Top 3 Unicorn Founder Profile Facts:
Previously founded another company
Worked at another entrepreneurial company
STEM Undergrad/grad degree
