this study, we investigate the educational attainment of U.S.-born startup founders.
Theprimary data source for this work is a subset of an existing dataset of corporate records included in
Dun & Bradstreet’s (D&B) Million Dollar Database.
These listings contain U.S. companies with sales in
excess of $1 million, twenty or more employees, and
company branches with fifty or more employees. To
construct our dataset, we extracted records of all
engineering and technology companies founded from
1995–2005 (representing the most current decade of
data at the time of this initial search). This produced a
listing of 28,766 companies. A portion (less than 10
percent) of these, which represented shell companies
with zero U.S. employees or older companies with
recent changes in control/corporate restructurings,
were omitted from our dataset. Approximately 1,800
of the remaining companies were randomly contacted
by our research team via phone or e-mail. During our
interview requests, we sought to speak directly with a
company founder(s) or a direct representative to
determine if the founder or founders were U.S.-born.