Ilya Strebulaev

“Ilya... describes an industry trained to care far more about the size of a possible success than about how often the bets fail.”

“Supervoting shares separate voting power from economic ownership.”

“Strebulaev advises founders to rarely ask for supervoting, since it signals an expected shareholder conflict and can cost valuation”

“Applying a weighted moving average of fund size to Ilya Strebulaev's ranking moved Union Square Ventures up 37 places and First Round up 36 places, among other double-digit swings.”

“Most public VC rankings implicitly reward AUM and brand recognition rather than dollar-weighted returns.”

“So together with Blake Jackson I built an alternative: the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Ranking.”

“Stanford GSB professor Ilya Strebulaev's analysis compares the prior employers of 2,633 unicorn founders (2015 or earlier) against 1,194 founders of unicorns founded in 2016 or later.”

“Fewer than three-quarters of CEOs at IPO had held the role at initial investment, while each company's core business line stayed stable.”

“Ilya Strebulaev - Stanford finance professor (implied by source citation)”

“The top 1% of VCs (about 120 VCs) earned 56.6% of the $1.2 trillion in net profits. The top 5% (about 600 VCs) earned 90.1%.”

“For talent scouts and pre-seed investors, Google, Facebook and OpenAI are the new proxy worth watching.”

“Among 1,377 multi-founder US unicorns, 68.6% have co-founders who previously worked together or studied together, with shared employers (57.8%) more common than shared schools (33.3%).”

“PayPal's odds ratio as a founder-producing employer fell from 12.0x pre-2016 to 1.7x since.”

“Among employers with 10+ unicorn founders, OpenAI alumni are 14.7x overrepresented versus a random sample, ahead of Check Point (11.2x) and D.E. Shaw (9.8x).”

“Take a look at who sits in the 5% of VCs that have generated roughly 90% of the industry's profits. Researchers Ilya Strebulaev and Blake Jackson put together an inaugural list of the top VC firms.”

“619 unicorns were created between 2020–2022; only 99 have exited. At five years, the cohort sits at 20% cumulative exit rate. The 1999–2015 and 2016–2019 cohorts were at 54% and 52% at the same mark.”

“The Kabbage case study shows common shareholders holding the largest fully diluted stake (~28%) received zero at a $430M exit, because six preferred series with combined preferences exceeding $435M cleared first.”

“Stanford's Ilya Strebulaev uses real cap tables from Dropbox and Kabbage to show that liquidation preferences, not ownership stakes, determine exit proceeds.”

“474 of 1,078 Unicorn Founders Are Foreign-Born, From 65 Countries... The relocation effect is large across multiple origin countries, with startups from several nations 2.5x to 9x more likely to reach unicorn status after moving to the US than those that stayed home.”

“Only Stanford, Harvard, and MIT appear in every single year's top 10 across all nine vintages (2017-2025): Stanford took the #1 spot in six of nine vintages but slipped to #3 in 2023 and 2024 before bouncing back to #1 for 2025.”