The top 10 most entrepreneurial company alumni networks
founderdating.comTrilogy at one point of time was among fastest growing software companies. Its training program for new employees called Trilogy University was covered by HBR in one of their case studies [1].
One of the reasons why so many Trilogy alums have gone ahead to found their own startups is because Trilogy University in itself encourage entrepreneurial thinking. New grads who had joined Trilogy were given opportunity to form teams and pitch new business ideas to the CEO. Irrespective of the fact if the CEO liked the idea or not, you could go ahead and work on it. The goal somewhat ( maybe similar to YCombinator) was to have a working prototype with real users live by end of 3 months. And then the whole team decided which ideas were success and worth pursuing post the training program.
I'll guess Yahoo is quite high because they have historically grown by acquisition. All those entrepreneurs aren't really "native" to Yahoo. They're acquired by Yahoo, stay for a couple years, and then start a new thing.
This seems to suggest that founderdating needs to do a better job getting members from the more successful alumni networks (Paypal, Salesforce, etc); the salesforce alumni network had $8b in IPOs in the past 6 weeks alone.
Or perhaps the Paypal and Salesforce mafias don't need Founderdating?
It seems like a very non-scientific sample, but still interesting. Google versus Yahoo was a surprise, but perhaps Yahoo also has incented more people to leave over time.
I'll be curious to see success rates of entrepreneurs from those alumni networks - although we'll have to define what's successful in the first place.
Good call. I'd love to see the stats on that as well. Love seeing Twilio on that list. :)
I was surprised to see Netflix so high and not to see Amazon on the list at all. Anyone else?
I wasn't. :) Working at Netflix now, I can see why. It really is a great place to work, and I can't imagine someone offering me something more interesting (but I'm not completely locking that out).
I'm pretty sure my next move will be to my own startup, as that would be the only place that might offer a better work environment and better opportunity for learning and growth.
Half of the startups in India have an ex-trilogy founder.
Why does eBay include Skype?
just corrected that, was just a mistake on the blog.