LinkedIn has an incredible amount of information about people and their careers. LinkedIn decided to go through their more than 120 million public profiles of people and analyze the shared qualities all these entrepreneurs have.
I thought that it was interesting how LinkedIn decided to weed out non-startups. You have to remember that the term “Startup” was coined during the surge of Dot Com companies that popped up in the 1990’s. Here is the Wikipedia page: Startup Company.
Due to the definition Electronic Logic Concepts is technically not a startup even though I founded it several years ago. We have proprietary knowledge and proprietary methods that I have built up over the years of experience I have working in Internet Marketing, none of it is intellectual property.
Startup Founders are LinkedIn professionals who identify themselves as founders (or co-founders) of U.S. companies created after 2000, with a LinkedIn company profile, and that currently have between 2 – 200 employees. We have excluded small law, consulting and real estate firms, as well as LLCs (limited liability companies) – and assembled a pool of over 13,000 entrepreneurs. We then compared them with the average LinkedIn member and highlight characteristics that disproportionately appear among startup founders.
It is no surprise that the entrepreneurs are young, nor is is a surprise that they are highly intelligent and have attended some of the top schools in the nation. I find it interesting that a majority of them didn’t spring straight out of school with their fresh degree and start reinventing the world.
Our infographic shows the top over-represented business schools among entrepreneurs – with Stanford, Harvard and MIT Sloan taking the top spots. If that doesn’t come as a surprise to you, take a look at the distribution of founders’ age at their first startup. While young (and serial) entrepreneurs are often in the spotlight, our data shows that 65% of entrepreneurs are 30 and older – and only 2% are serial entrepreneurs.
The data shows that most of the startup founders were working for 2.5 years in some the biggest high tech companies in the world. And just like LinkedIn wanted to prove (I’m sure) that the founders did not work alone in a bubble they used their network connections to find startup capitol and other resources.
I posted LinkedIn’s infographic below.
Info graphic from LinkedIn
Original Post on LinkedIn: Sequencing the Startup DNA on LinkedIn
There is a really interesting presentation about the study’s findings that Monica Rogati of LinkedIn presented at the 2011 Startup Festival. It is definitely worth watching.