Harvard Business School has 15 MBA-founded startups on our 2024 list.
WHICH SCHOOLS HAVE THE MOST STARTUPS?
It takes some doing to knock Stanford Graduate School of Business out of the top spot for the highest-funded MBA startup. Since we started the list in 2014, the top MBA founders have come from Stanford every year except four (and a half).
In 2018, Harvard Business School MBAs Charles Baron and Amol Deshpande ranked No. 1 with their company, Farmers Business Network, which raised $193.9 million. The Wharton School MBAs William Shu and Greg Orlowski topped the list in 2017 with Deliveroo, raising $474.6 million. And in 2014, the top spot was shared by the Harvard and Stanford MBA founders of Wildfire.
INSEAD has now topped the list three years in a row – twice with grocery delivery startup Gorillas and now with Capchase. Both companies join Sofi as billion-dollar darlings.
Two schools consistently turn out more MBA startups on our annual list than any other: Stanford GSB and Harvard Business School. This year, they account for more than half of the top 100 all by themselves.
Of the 100 startups that attracted the most funding from angel investors and venture capitalists over the last five years, Stanford claims 43 – up from the 30 it claimed in 2023 and just as many as it claimed in 2022.
HBS had the second most startups from MBA or EMBA founders at 15. That’s down from the 22 it claimed last year.
Columbia Business School had the third largest number of startups on the list at 12, followed by INSEAD’s 8 and UC Berkley Haas’ 7.
Stanford’s 43 startups raised $1.83 billion altogether. INSEAD’s 8 startups raised $1.35 billion while HBS’ 15 raised just over $1 billion.
By location, the San Francisco Bay Area continues to be the most popular home base for top MBA startups. Of course, this is largely influenced by the number of Stanford MBAs on the list. Of the 100 top MBA startups this year, 29 are based around San Francisco.
New York City is the next most popular base at 24 while the Boston area claims 5. For 2024, 27 startups are based outside of the U.S. That includes 4 in Europe, five in Mexico and 3 in Brazil.
STANFORD’S UNCHALLENGED ENTREPRENEURIAL CONNECTIONS
Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford GSB’s access and deep connections to the world’s premier startup and innovation hub gives its entrepreneurial MBAs advantages that can be hard to replicate at other business schools.
Take Tyler Maloney, MBA Class of 2020. He’s founded two startups during and since his time at Stanford, one that cracked our top 100 list this year. Faves is the “Pinterest for Gen Z,” while TeachMe.To is the “Airbnb of learning a new skill.” Both have raised millions.
While Maloney has since left Faves to his co-founder in order to devote his full attention to TeachMe.To, he attributes Stanford’s access to world class company builders to his fund raising success. Faves’ lead investor was a class above Maloney at GSB. A GSB professor, Graham Weaver, is an angel investor at TeachMe.To. Other investors include Sam Altman, whom he met through one of his classmates, and Deb Liu, a GSB graduate, “so I certainly played that up when I cold emailed her,” Maloney tells P&Q.
TeachMe.To MBA founder Tyler Maloney (front) with his co-founder Nick O’Brien during a seed fundraise round in San Francisco. Courtesy photo
“When I look back, it’s astonishing that I had the opportunity to sit in a classroom and download learnings from some of the most successful, thoughtful entrepreneurs in the entire world,” he tells P&Q. “I remember walking into some random Wednesday class and Reid Hoffman was casually sitting there as today’s guest lecturer. There were something like 20 students there that got to pick his brain for an hour and a half. I had to pinch myself. And these types of things happened every single week.”
TeachMe.To has raised $7.5 million to date and lands at No. 99 on our top 100. The inspiration hit when Maloney was living in the Bay Area and wanted to learn how to kiteboard. He found websites that offered lessons, but not the information that would make him actually commit – no pricing information, no reviews, no way to even buy a lesson online.
“It struck me that these instructors have an incredible skill to share with the world, but they're not necessarily great at building websites, creating an online presence or promoting themselves. As a result, countless people will miss the opportunity to learn from them.”
Tyler Maloney, MBA '20, founder of TeachMe.To
TeachMe.To is now becoming the go-to website to find a private instructor for golf, tennis, pickleball, surfing, guitar, singing, and more. It allows users to find, compare and book coaches close to where they are, and to schedule lessons that fit into their lives – all with a few clicks on the platform. It delivers more than 250 lessons a day in 150 cities across the U.S., Canada and Australia.
The company grew tenfold in the last year, and Maloney aspires to build it into an “Airbnb-scale company that eventually changes how we approach education in the U.S. and abroad.”
“I think we’re building something the world needs and it's an intuitive concept that people just 'get',” he says. “Who hasn't dreamed of learning something new? The problem is that today the barrier to get started is so high.”
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