It’s summer time — the time when America’s biggest banks and tech companies fill their offices with ambitious college interns.
These internships are notoriously competitive to land. Makes sense. They’re essentially a stepping stone to a lucrative career.
But this summer, something unusual is happening. Many of the country’s superstar students aren’t showing up.
Where are they going instead? Today, I’ll reveal the answer. Then I’ll explain why their whereabouts could lead you to big profits — or big losses.
Choosing a Different Path
For years, the career path for top business students has been well defined.
Land an internship at a company like Goldman Sachs or Facebook. Do some networking. Aim to get an offer for full-time employment before graduation.
But many of today’s top students are choosing a different path. They’re shunning prestigious summer internships and saying “no thanks” to the traditional career path.
They have other dreams…
Forget the Internship… Start Building a Company Now
As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, more and more students are spending their summers launching startups.
They’re enrolling in accelerator programs, networking with venture capitalists, and working around the clock. Some are even raising funding for their startup before they’ve graduated.
These students are turning to history for inspiration. Founders like Mark Zuckerberg (META), Patrick Collison (Stripe), and Evan Spiegel (Snapchat) turned dorm-room ideas into multi-billion-dollar businesses.
Today’s young entrepreneurs are naturally wondering…
“Why Not Me?”
Why not them, indeed.
After all, today’s technologies are lowering the barriers to starting a business.
Artificial Intelligence can write code, create marketing materials, and automate tasks that once required a team of employees.
A motivated college student can create a prototype over the summer, find paying customers online, and raise capital — all before their classmates have started looking for a full-time job.
It’s become clear that you don’t need a college degree to build a startup.
But do you need one to build a successful startup?
What The Numbers Tell Us
As it turns out, according to the data, a college degree sure helps.
College dropouts like Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs make for great stories. But they’re the exception, not the rule.
Kauffman Fellows, which analyzed 90,000 U.S. venture-backed startups and more than 419,000 startup executive roles, found that nearly 60% of these executives held not just a college degree, but an advanced degree. And 70% of startups had at least one C-suite executive with an advanced degree.
What’s the reason for this? Well, founders with degrees are more likely to have developed the critical-thinking skills needed to solve complex problems.
Just as important, earning a degree often reflects qualities that are essential for building a successful company: commitment, discipline, and the motivation to see difficult projects through to completion.
What This Means for Investors Like You
If you’re planning to launch a startup, these findings are worth keeping in mind.
But they’re equally important for people like you — people planning to invest in startups.
After all, when you invest in a young company, what you’re really investing in is the people behind it.
That’s why, here at Crowdability, we spend significant time and effort evaluating the background of a startup’s founding team — including its education.
As the research has proven, well-educated founders are more likely to possess the skills, discipline, and perseverance needed to build successful startups.
By carefully evaluating a startup’s team, we can stack the odds in our favor.
Happy investing.
