The Best B-Schools To Help You Launch A Startup

If you are a list junkie and you're interested in using an MBA experience as an incubator to launch a startup, you'll probably turn to one of several rankings. U.S. News & World Report and the Princeton Review maintain that Babson College just outside Boston in Massachusetts offers the best MBA for would-be entrepreneurs. The Financial Times, meantime, crowns Stanford Graduate School of Business as the best place for MBA entrepreneurs.

Problem is, all three of these rankings are deeply flawed. U.S. News bases its list solely on a survey of business school deans and MBA directors which renders its ranking little more than a popularity contest. The Princeton Review list is based on a vague methodology that is so discredited that Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, UC-Berkeley, MIT Sloan and other top schools decline to cooperate with. And the Financial Times list is little more than an odd offshoot of the alumni survey portion of its overall MBA ranking (see all three of these rankings on our composite list).

That's why we at Poets&Quants take a dollars-and-cents look at business school success in the startup space. For the past six years, we've annually tracked the MBA startups that have raised the most money from angel investors and venture capitalists (see Top 100 MBA Startups of 2019). On one level, it's the ultimate early test of a strong idea. If you pass muster with discerning outside investors who do nothing except look at potential deals day in and day out, you're certainly done something right. How much money a startup raises is also really the only reliable number reported by a young, private enterprise where basic profit and revenue data is hidden from view.

One clear takeaway from this dataset is that a young MBA entrepreneur's access to capital is highly dependent on brand. Investors favor MBA startups born on well-known, highly respected campuses. It's as if a Stanford or Harvard on your resume is a sign of third party approval.

Using this show-me-the-money approach to evaluate a business school's success in entrepreneurship also has its limits, of course. The biggest drawback is that it fails to capture much of the MBA startup activity that is bootstrapped. It's total focus on results also means that it does account for the number of entrepreneurship electives, the mentoring by serial entrepreneurs, and the possible financial support for an idea.

So consider this a valuable data point, but not the whole story. Certainly, it's a better way to evaluate a school's success with MBA startups than the other alternative rankings. Which school has the most MBA startups (launched in the past five years) on our list of the top 100?

The 2019 winner is Stanford Graduate School of Business with 39 startups of the top 101 startups, including the top three ventures. No. 1 Branch Metrics, a software play that allows deep linking in apps, has raised nearly $250 million alone. All told, the 39 startups created on the Stanford campus are backed by a whopping $1.3 billion plus in combined venture backing (to see all 101 startups that made our list click here).

Following Stanford is Harvard Business School, which in past years has either edged out Stanford for the lead or been in neck-to-neck competition with its arch rival. Harvard MBAs have 21 of the startups on the list, raising a total of $729 million over the past five years.

Here's the complete lineup by school, number of startups that made our Top 100 list, and the total amount of funding raised by the startups

1. Stanford Graduate School of Business, 39 startups, $1,331 million raised
2. Harvard Business School, 21 startups, $729.1 million raised
3. Columbia Business School, 9 startups, $321.0 million raised
4. Wharton, 9 startups, $164.6 million raised
5. Northwestern Kellogg School of Management, 6 startups, $169.3 million raised
6. Chicago Booth School of Business, 5 startups, $222.9 million raised
7. UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business, 5 startups, $62.0 million raised
8. Yale School of Management, 3 startups, $35.8 million raised
9. Virginia Darden School of Business, 1 startup, $10.0 million raised
10. MIT Sloan School of Management, 1 startup, $21.3 million raised
11. New York University (Stern), 1 startup, $10.0 million raised
12. Washington University in St. Louis (Olin), 1 startup, $5.0 million raised