71% of top AI investors with an MBA came from Stanford or Harvard: capital is still a matter of networks

By Poets&Quants · October 26, 2026.

Of the 100 top-ranked AI venture capital investors in the U.S., 38 hold an MBA, and 27 of those degrees (71.1%) come from Stanford GSB (15) or Harvard Business School (12). That is the analysis Stanford GSB professor Ilya Strebulaev shared with Poets&Quants on the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson ranking.

The concentration is even greater at the top. Five of the top 10 hold MBAs, and four of them are from Stanford, according to the analysis. They include Matthew Murphy (Menlo Ventures, No. 1), David George and Sarah Wang (Andreessen Horowitz, Nos. 5 and 6) and Marc Stad (Dragoneer, No. 7). Joshua Kushner (Thrive Capital, No. 4) is the fifth, with a Harvard degree.

An important caveat: the ranking scores individuals, not firms, and counts only investments in venture-backed U.S. AI companies, with a cutoff of August 31, 2026. To decide what counts as an AI company, the authors classified 728 companies using a "removal test": if you take the AI out of the product, is there still something a customer would buy? The score combines six factors, including the valuation of the companies funded, dilution and net profit.

The data also has limits. According to Strebulaev, having an MBA doesn't place anyone higher: those who have one rank, on average, about the same as those who don't. In addition, 62 of the 100 don't have an MBA. And the criteria were strict: Guru Chahal (No. 2, a non-degree Harvard program) and Sol Bier (No. 10, who dropped out of Harvard's MBA) were left out. Counting them, seven of the top 10 would have ties to Stanford or Harvard.

Expanding to the top 200, the percentage barely changes (74 with MBAs, or 37%), but the duopoly weakens: from No. 101 to No. 200, Stanford and Harvard account for 16 of 36 MBAs, Wharton and MIT Sloan gain ground, and schools such as INSEAD appear for the first time.

**Our take.** Our thesis is that this data doesn't measure the value of an MBA but how concentrated access to capital is. The fact that graduates perform the same as everyone else suggests the school doesn't make someone a better investor. What it does is place them in the right network. Strebulaev himself points to this: Stanford investors tend to invest in Stanford founders, and proximity to Sand Hill Road, the Silicon Valley corridor where the funds are concentrated, also matters.

Broadly speaking, this has an uncomfortable consequence for a technology marketed as democratizing: decisions about which AI startups grow are made by a very small, homogeneous circle. Those already inside that network win, and the brilliant founder without the right contact loses. It's a short-term bias worth naming without dramatizing it. With a sample of 100 people and no causal data, there's no way to say this pattern makes investments worse.

There are reasons not to be pessimistic. Cheaper models and the rise of open source reduce how much capital it takes to get started, and that weakens the funds' gatekeeping power. The cheaper it is to build, the less it will matter which door you knock on. That's the path toward a more widely shared abundance. In the meantime, the data serves as a reminder: the technology may be open, but the money that funds it still passes through very few hands.