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University Report2020
1
A lot has changed this year, but we believe in young founders now more than ever.
At Contrary, partnering with the brightest, early-career talent is all we do. Across hundreds of 1:1 conversations throughout the past 12 months, the core theme of this year has been that in spite of immense tribulations, there’s consensus among young founders that there’s no better time to build.
In this year’s annual University Report, we’ll be highlighting some of the top programs and opportunities for new or existing founders at universities and provide a comprehensive, up-to-date set of school rankings. We’ve analyzed publicly available data, and conducted research on-the-ground with our Venture Partner network to identify what makes a strong ecosystem.
We’ve also added a new section called Startup Spotlight, where we feature some of the most exciting companies coming out of universities in 2020.
INTRODUCTION
2
1 Stanford UniversityStanford, CA Last Year’s Rank: 1
2 Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyCambridge, MA Last Year’s Rank: 2
3 University of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia, PA Last Year’s Rank: 4
4 Harvard UniversityCambridge, MA Last Year’s Rank: 5
5University of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles, CA Last Year’s Rank: 9
6University of California, BerkeleyBerkeley, CA Last Year’s Rank: 3
7Columbia UniversityNew York, NY Last Year’s Rank: 11
8Cornell UniversityIthaca, NY Last Year’s Rank: 7
9University of IllinoisUrbana-Champaign, IL Wasn’t Ranked
10University of Texas at AustinAustin, TX Wasn’t Ranked
Top 10 Entrepreneurial Universities of 2020
“In addition to Austin’s continued rise as a major startup hub, UT Austin has been consistently investing in startup activity at the university level, across both students and faculty. The latter of which has been led by Bob Metcalfe, UT Austin Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.”
Eric Tarczynski
“The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a new entrant this year thanks in large part to the sizable seed financings of Trala, QuillBot, and Atmos. We’ve been keeping an eye on UIUC as the university has shown consistent growth in venture-backed startups over the years.”
Will Robbins
3
Evaluating University Ecosystems
Contrary has rigorously tracked campus startup activity since our founding in 2016 — our internal database lists thousands of companies, including information about founding teams, backgrounds, and sectors.
Our final rankings were based on a combination of factors representing the number of people building companies on or around campus as of today. This includes the number of currently active founders per student, diversity metrics, breadth of the entrepreneurship programming, and access to funding. We combed through up-to-date data from several public and private sources to collect this information.
Our top 10 schools had
60%more female founders than the 2019 U.S. National Average
from Silicon Valley Bank
Columbia and USC had the best male to female ratio, over 2x the national average
Certain schools had over
20xas many startups per student as lower ranked schools, including schools in the top 20.
1:100 Startups to Students at Stanford & Harvard
3,400+ 46 327
4
COVID-19 Trends at a Glance
Surveying hundreds of students across the country and compiling research from various sources, we studied the broader trends driven by the coronavirus.
1 in 5students admitted to Harvard and Yale’s freshman classes have deferred admission
“A year ago I didn’t know what VC was, I didn’t know how startups worked, and I didn’t know anyone who was seriously interested in the space. This year, through virtual communities, I’ve felt the exponentially compounding impact of meeting new people working on things they’re absolutely thrilled by. It’s been a year of discovering unknown unknowns, and I don’t think the me of last year would recognize the me of today.”
30%Estimated drop in international student enrollment worldwide
15,000Maximum number of COVID tests administered daily at UIUC
66%of colleges were completely or mostly online this Fall
2,000+77%
Ethan Ding
“When everyone was sent home, I was frustrated to see the sharpest students and builders sit idly by at home — under-stimulated. Building entrepreneurial communities at universities has been challenging but rewarding this semester. We’ve gotten to explore exciting new communities, but I truly can’t wait for the day where we can all build in person again. ”
Julie Chen
5
Spotlight
This year, we’re highlighting some of the top university and early-career founded startups that have caught our eye. We see a few thousand companies every year at Contrary, and after meeting the founders, the companies that made it onto this year’s Spotlight stood out as being particularly exciting based on three key criteria:
Many have recently raised from angels, VCs, and top accelerators, and are led by diverse founders with impressive experience and talent.
Given so much of the economic uncertainty this year, we were impressed by the founders' resilience for building through COVID, and for adapting to remote work. These startups are revolutionizing their industries, from mental health services to AI manufacturing.
1 Potential impact on the industries they are working in
3 Traction in terms of product, revenue, and financing to date
2 Skillset and strengths of the founding team
Read On
6
Startup Spotlight
“I started Strella when I read that 40% of food is wasted before it's consumed. It was such a mind boggling number that it prompted me to learn more about our food supply chain and try to figure out how to solve the problem.
Our current supply chains aren’t designed for the kind of volatility that's introduced during events like the pandemic. As a result, we experience a ton of additional waste, difficulty moving and sourcing product and decreased quality of food.”
Katherine Sizov
Recurrency
Building an automation and optimization-centric enterprise resource planner (ERP) for distributors.
Prairie Health
Providing personalized mental healthcare for people with anxiety and depression. By going direct to consumers and using cutting-edge genetic screening to match patients with the right solutions, Prairie helps patients get their health right on the first try.
Metamanagement
Saving B2B vendors 5,000+ hours of custom development, offering on-prem and VPC-based software deployments with seamless updates and monitoring.
Carda Health
Providing digital cardiac rehabilitation programs for those who are recovering from a heart attack or heart surgery, as well as patients with long-term conditions like chronic heart failure. Right now, only 15% of qualifying Americans attend cardiac rehab — Carda Health is changing that.
Strella BiotechnologyOptimizing the food supply chain by producing maturity sensors that work to deliver better produce and reduce food waste.
AnyScale
Creating a framework for building machine learning applications at any scale. AnyScale originated from UC Berkeley’s RISELab.
Dreambound
Helping you pay for — and finish — a top certified nursing assistant (CNA) training program, and find you a job right away.
Alloy
Helping you automate your workflows with no code whatsoever. You can sit back and watch your apps do the work. Alloy Automation currently supports 50+ app integrations in sales, marketing, customer support and messaging.
7
Startup Spotlight
“I’m not sure any of us were set on becoming entrepreneurs, but the idea that we could build something that would be unequivocally good in terms of helping an industry that had been ignored by technology and having some impact on the environment was appealing to all of us.
We’ve essentially built the entire business remotely. Most of our development team is remote so we’ve never met them in person and we also haven’t met any of our current users in person.”
Wyatt Pontius
RematterBuilding a system that enables industrial recycling facilities to better manage their inventory, customers, assets, and dispatching. Started by team of Stanford recent grads.
Aryeo
Providing real estate photographers, videographers and virtual tour providers with a comprehensive file management system for all content, including an integrated payment system. They also provide photographers with customizable property websites to help them market their business and provide more value to customers.
Fractal
Transforming your laptop or internet-connected device into a supercomputer. Edit, render, and play at high speeds from any Windows, Apple, or Linux computer with cloud GPU, RAM, and CPUs.
Polygon
Providing online access to professional psychologists, and offers online evaluations for learning differences and actionable feedback to allow for early diagnoses and support for students age 6 or over.
Tava Health
Partnering with employers to provide convenient, accessible mental health services to people everywhere.
Bluebook Cities
Building and operating a new kind of city to help people realize their potential.
Kargo
Building a smart loading dock. Its camera modules and AI algorithm automatically scans barcodes, rendering scan-guns obsolete. It immediately tracks shipping mistakes, eliminating cycle counts and production loss. Kargo is building a factory operating system that will make manufacturing faster and more efficient than ever.
8
The Most Common Traits of Top Ranked University Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
Based on student surveys, the advice of our Venture Partner network, and our own experiences, each year we publish a handful of characteristics common across thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems. Universities hoping to build up a culture of entrepreneurship should take note of these three things:
“No Strings Attached” Access to Funding
Easy access to idea-stage grant funding is vital for supporting university entrepreneurs who are testing out new ideas and putting together a team. It's also a democratization tool, allowing those who might not have had the financial resources an attempt at building their business.
Many universities offer this funding, but the best trust their students and offer it with no strings attached, without long or difficult application cycles. For example, MIT Sandbox gives qualifying founders up to $25k to use as they wish.
Centralization
Many universities we work with are siloed, which makes collaboration difficult. Because people don’t know who’s working on what, talent can’t be funneled in the appropriate direction and resources are either hidden or unevenly distributed. For example, it’s not uncommon to find departments within universities that develop several different incubators and programs separately.
Ultimately, independent programs fail to foster interdisciplinary collaboration. Building strong common areas or student spaces instead can allow for organic culture creation, and provides ways for co-founders to meet each other and build a cross-discipline network. Harvard's "i-lab" is a good example of this.
No Red Tape
Top entrepreneurial universities make it easy for anyone interested to get involved in the ecosystem, regardless of their chosen idea. They don't put up red tape and restrictions around things like pitch competitions, receiving grant funding, or getting involved in incubators. Excessive restrictions around accessing university programming only makes it harder for students to balance school with their companies.
One university in our network makes students participate in multiple mandatory workshops to participate in a pitch competition. This ultimately wastes time for many entrepreneurs and adversely selects participants. In this case, we’d recommend open-signup or written applications.
9
A Letter To Those Who Are Building
Conferences on the future of education often extoll the virtue of “preparing pupils for an unpredictable world”. One in which 85% of the jobs that will exist by 2030, don’t yet exist. What does that actually mean? How would it feel to live through such a drastic transition?
2020 gave us an answer. As the world responded to a global pandemic, we learned rather quickly what that gradual shift might may felt like. Inevitable changes, such as dozens of the world’s leading companies declaring their intentions to remain “remote-first” even after we’re all vaccinated, happened in the blink of an eye. As educational institutions reeled from the sudden shift to remote education, schools like Sora are showing how the internet can give us the student-centered education we all deserve, online.
In the following decade, we will see the physical world fully consumed by software. But, what does this mean for you, a college student in 2020? It means you have a tremendous advantage. You have an intuition about digital culture and online communities that cannot be bought. Who will build a better product for this rapidly evolving future? You, who has spent your entire conscious life with the internet at your disposal, who has built powerful relationships online, and who has learned to grow online, even throughout incredibly turbulent times.
It’s time to build.
How to Start a Startup guidesContrary Talent
Startup Search
To see a comprehensive list of startup resources on your campus, check out our . To meet other builders, learn more about
. And to get a hand-picked list of the best jobs and internships at top startups, check out .
Garrett Smiley
10
2020 will be remembered as a year where the American university ecosystem skillfully adapted to overcome great adversity.
All of the universities on our list (and many others) are successfuly delivering a vast array of resources to support entrepreneurs online. We have also been impressed by how well student-led organizations have successfully pivoted to virtual hackathons, pitch competitions, and other events. Schools across the country have stepped up, and are continuing to conduct vital research on vaccines, drug treatments, and public health measures that will put the pandemic to an end. And even in the midst of so much uncertainty, motivated founders will find ways to create great businesses, as our Startup Spotlight demonstrates. In fact, almost all of our Venture Partners saw an increase in startup activity on campus this fall.
COVID-19 has highlighted the serious challenges society is facing, and we believe young people will be our changemakers by building companies across healthcare, climate change, social justice, mental wellness, and more.
Contrary exists to empower young builders and leaders to learn, grow, and create, even when the university experience has been changed drastically. While 2020 has been an extraordinary year, we continue to have full conviction in universities as the central building block for innovation moving forward.
Closing Remarks
Eric Tarczynski
contrarycap.com [email protected]
This report does not serve as investment advice or offering of
any securities, and should not be used in any investment decisions.
Content contains a mix of public and private information collected about currently
enrolled, technology-focused entrepreneurs, as well as recent graduates and
drop-outs no more than two years out of school.
© 2020 Contrary, LLC. All rights reserved.
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