Money Doesn’t Just Grow on Trees

With the Big Game upon us next week, this also means tiz the season for Pitchbook’s annual Universities startups report. 

If you’re not first, you’re last? 

This year, Pitchbook has Berkeley as the #2 university globally for VC-backed startups founded by alumni (yet again; Undergrad category), trailing Stanfurd by only 5 startups (versus 54 startups last year). 

Based on our many unpublished investments alone, I can tell you that Berkeley is quietly #1 for undergrad alum founded startups…perhaps next year I'll send Pitchbook these investments (topic for another post on why we don’t today).

Source: Pitchbook

Rising in the Ranks? 

In the Graduate category, Cal is rising in the ranks from #9 last year to #5 this year. This is no surprise. While I’d like to say the volume of new Graduate-founded startups has exploded (it’s definitely growing at a meaningful clip), this big leap is due to other reasons.

Last year, I called out how Pitchbook only covers MBAs in this category, and it seems they’ve taken note in the spirit of bolstering their dataset and analysis. All postgrad degree holders are now included. 

Source: Pitchbook

I believe this still does not cover faculty, postdocs, staff, and dropouts — all people that have a reason to care about their University and that we deem worthy of counting as affiliates. Some of these categories are harder to track, so today I’ll give Pitchbook an applause for taking a big step in the right direction. 

The combination of Berkeley’s huge numbers advantage, it’s increasing participation rate in entrepreneurship, and meaningful startup production that we see in these untracked categories (as indicated by our internal dataset), lead us to believe it will soon be very clear that Berkeley is the #1 producer of VC-backed startups. 

There’s Still A Funding Gap

While company count is very close, when combining Undergrad & Graduate categories, there is still a big $146.5+ Billion funding gap between Berkeley ($93.1B) and Stanfurd ($239.6B). 

That's where The House Fund comes in, investing exclusively in startups with at least one Berkeley affiliated co-founder. We’ve already funded two of the top five Berkeley startups by capital raised (unicorns Flexport & Forte). The other three highlighted were founded before our time. 

That all said, funding does not equal success. I believe Berkeley founders are more capital efficient than Stanfurd founders, so we don’t need to fully close that gap.

Bears know that money doesn’t just grow on trees. Nor is money only made by Trees. By the way, watch out Trees, because we’ve got the Axe. 

-Fiance

To dig into the data, here is Pitchbook’s Universities Startup Report.