As a company focused on building communities for Alumni of Big Tech Companies (BTC), we were intrigued to explore the prevalence of BTC Alumni among Sequoia Capital’s short-listed startups. If you haven’t read the article ‘Generative AI’s Act Two’ by Sequoia have a look at it first.
Main findings of our analysis:
1️⃣ 74% of Sequoia's short-listed startups have at least one BTC alumnus, with AI Infrastructure startups leading the charge at 84%.
This strong representation of BTC Alumni aligns with market data suggesting that around 80% of successful IT startups have at least one BTC alumnus involved. This phenomenon can be partially attributed to the network effect and the power of the BTC brand, which instills confidence in clients and investors.
2️⃣ Among BTC Alumni founders, Google alumni (Xoogler.co) emerged as the most dominant group, followed by Meta, Microsoft (Microsoft Alumni Network), and Amazon. Notably, Netflix is the only MANGA company absent from this list of founders.
This strong representation of BTC Alumni aligns with market data suggesting that around 80% of successful IT startups have at least one BTC alumnus involved. This phenomenon can be partially attributed to the network effect and the power of the BTC brand, which instills confidence in clients and investors.
2️⃣ Among BTC Alumni founders, Google alumni (Xoogler.co) emerged as the most dominant group, followed by Meta, Microsoft (Microsoft Alumni Network), and Amazon. Notably, Netflix is the only MANGA company absent from this list of founders.
Research Notes
The current research focuses exclusively on startups operating in the artificial intelligence (AI) domain. The data on founders’ experience is sourced from LinkedIn.
To ensure a clear and focused analysis, companies that fall into the following categories were excluded from the sample:
1. Established corporations and mature companies.
2. Companies with valuations exceeding US$2bn and an age of over 10 years, or companies with valuations exceeding US$2bn that offer AI products as secondary offerings alongside their core products.
1. Established corporations and mature companies.
2. Companies with valuations exceeding US$2bn and an age of over 10 years, or companies with valuations exceeding US$2bn that offer AI products as secondary offerings alongside their core products.
The following companies were excluded from the sample due to the aforementioned criteria:
— TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Roblox, Unity, EPIC Games, Med-PaLM, Spotify, Attentive, Gong, Clari, Automation Anywhere, Amazon, MongoDB, Datadog, Amplitude, CoreWeave, Zendesk, Genesys, OpenAI, Сanva, Adobe.
The following 6 companies were excluded from the sample due to the lack of information about founders on LinkedIn:
— Remini, Armada, Foundry, AVA/GOSH, LX and newComputer.
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