Infographic – Harvard or Stanford? Venture Capitalists Revealed.

Venture capitalist demographics, July 2018. Click on image for full-size view. (Statista)

4 August 2018. A continuing and popular topic at Science & Enterprise is venture capital, a key source of financing for science-based start-ups and other new companies in the tech industries. Our reporting on venture capital, much like other business media, tells about the companies investing in early-stage enterprises, but what about the people in the industry?

Our friends at Statista published a chart yesterday about people called venture capitalists, or VCs, from data compiled by Richard Kerby, a partner in the venture capital investment company Equal Ventures, that appeared earlier this week on Medium, this weekend’s infographic. Kerby compared the demographic backgrounds of VCs in July 2018 compared to 2016, and found these investors continue to be largely white and Asian, and slightly more female than in 2016.

But this time, Kerby looked into one more factor: where did VCs go to school? His results show 4 out of 10 venture capital executives or associates attended either Harvard University or Stanford University for at least one of their degrees. Thus only two institutions produce nearly half of today’s venture capital investors. He calls this situation a “mirrortocracy” rather than a meritocracy, and says it contributes to a narrow perspective that makes the industry more, not less, insular.

You can find Kerby’s database of some 1,500 VCs online. For the record, I got a graduate degree at Boston University. It wasn’t Harvard, but I could see it from Boston U.

More from Science & Enterprise:

• New $315 Million Life Sciences Venture Fund Unveiled
• Infographic – Graphene Investment in Decline
• Infographic – Google Health Care Investments Take Off

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