Top 25 Colleges for Entrepreneurs

Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley and MIT lead all colleges in entrepreneurial capital raised and number of venture-funded companies founded by their graduates, as shown in this horizontal bar chart with data columns. The list of top companies founded by graduates of these colleges include many familiar names, such as Snap (Stanford), Lyft (Cornell), 23andMe (Yale) and Instacart (Waterloo). Data from Pitchbook were compiled in 2020 and include capital raised, number of companies founded and top company.

US colleges dominate the list. East Coast colleges far outnumber schools on the West Coast and in the rest of the US with the Ivy league fully represented. Two Israeli and one Canadian university round out the top 25.

Top Colleges for Entrepreneurs in a Horizontal Bar Chart with Data Columns

How I Made this Horizontal Bar Chart with Data Columns

The data for this chart is presented below:

Here's how I made the horizontal bar chart with data columns:

download the data from Pitchbook into Excel
create a horizontal stacked bar chart in PowerPoint based on the top 25 college data in the xlsx
use the Switch Bars and Series button to treat spreadsheet columns as series and rows as bars
add columns for the four regional categories (East Coast, West Coast, Rest of US, Rest of World)
copy data from the capital raised column to the appropriate regional column for each university
add the data column with the top company and its value
use Bars and Series dialog to indicate that the regional categories should appear on the chart and that the number of companies and top company column should appear as data columns
format bar totals (capital raised values) as $B
add axis title, hide rest of y axis and x axis line
reduce bar gaps to make bars wider
adjust internal chart margins to provide room for long series names and wide data columns
reduce font size of labels to improve look of chart
add legend and move to white space near bottom of chart
change colors of the series