71% of top AI investors with an MBA went to 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 US, 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 greater at the top. Five of the top 10 hold an MBA, 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 only counts investments in venture-backed US AI companies, with a cutoff of August 31, 2026. To decide what counts as an AI company, the authors classified 728 companies using an "elimination 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 funded companies, dilution and net profit.

The data also has limits. According to Strebulaev, having an MBA doesn't put anyone higher in the ranking: those who hold one rank, on average, roughly the same as those who don't. Moreover, 62 of the 100 have no MBA. And the criterion was strict: Guru Chahal (No. 2, a non-degree Harvard program) and Sol Bier (No. 10, who dropped out of Harvard's MBA) were excluded. 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 an MBA, 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 degree holders perform the same as everyone else suggests the school doesn't make for a better investor. What it does is place them in the right network. Strebulaev himself points this out: Stanford investors tend to invest in Stanford founders, and proximity to Sand Hill Road, the Silicon Valley corridor where funds are concentrated, also matters.

More broadly, 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; the brilliant founder without the right connection loses. It is a short-term bias worth naming, without dramatizing it: with a sample of 100 people and no causal data, one cannot claim this pattern leads to worse investments.

There are reasons not to be pessimistic. Cheaper models and the rise of open source reduce how much capital is needed to get started, and that weakens funds' gatekeeping power. The cheaper it is to build, the less it will matter which door you knock on. That is 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.