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Palantir Beats Stanford, Yahoo Cracks Top Three: This Founder Ranking Is a Bit Counterintuitive

A "founder talent density" ranking puts Palantir first, Stanford second, and Yahoo third. The liveliest discussion in the comments is not about the No. 1 spot, but about No. 3. Some dug up Yahoo's status back in the day, while others questioned whether the data is already two years out of date.

Deedy posted a ranking on X that counts the 50 "birthplaces" with the densest concentration of founders. Palantir ranks first, Stanford second, and Yahoo third.

The chart lists three columns: total startups, startups per thousand employees, and pass rate. Palantir's data is 16.5 companies, 95 per thousand people, and a 49% pass rate. Stanford is 14.2 companies, 271 per thousand people, and a 37% pass rate. Yahoo's specific numbers are in the chart, but third place alone is enough to make you pause.

A statistical chart about employee entrepreneurship at different companies and universities. It lists multiple employers and their affiliated startups' total number, average number per thousand employees, and pass rate. The data is presented in a table, divided into two major sections: the left part is the top 25, and the right part is ranks 26 to 50. Each entry includes: company or university name; total number of startups; average number per thousand employees; pass rate percentage. For example, ranked first is Palantir, with 16.5 startups, an average of 95 per thousand employees, and a 49% pass rate. Second is Stanford University, with 14.2 startups, an average of 271 per thousand employees, and a 37% pass rate. The chart data can help us understand which institutions stand out in cultivating and promoting innovation, and how active their employees are in entrepreneurship.

Palantir being first is basically accepted in the comments. Someone explained that Palantir engineers are often stationed at customer offices and do not write code at headquarters, so they have to learn early how to sell and how to do customer discovery. In that user's words, "forward deployed engineers do customer discovery for years." That may help with starting a company more directly than writing excellent code.

Yahoo being third split the reactions. Some directly asked: Yahoo still exists? Someone posted a video of a man in an orange T-shirt and a white hat sitting in a chair, with an expression somewhere between surprise and confusion.

But after a few replies, the logic becomes clear. One user said Yahoo in the 2000s was basically today's Google. Another added that Yahoo has existed longer than most companies on the list. Someone else said WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton met at Yahoo. That one company alone is enough to support Yahoo's ranking.

A more practical explanation comes from Mikhail Rogov: Yahoo had a lot of headcount back then, and people who cashed out early had money; with money, they dared to go out and start something on their own. Palantir is another path: engineers spend years at customer sites, know where the pain points are, and also know how to collect money. The two paths are different, but both point to the same thing: being close to customers and money.

The list itself is also controversial. Some asked about the data source and methodology, while others said directly that the statistics are probably two years out of date. Some defended CMU, surprised by its position. McKinsey was named as "should be in the top three," while NVIDIA was teased: people who leave NVIDIA to start companies have serious guts.

What this list really measures may not be "concentration of smart people." Stanford has network effects, Palantir has customer sites, and Yahoo has the dividends of its era and early stock options. These three things are not on the same dimension; forcing them into one ranking actually puts "where you work determines what you see" on the table.

Rankings go out of date, and data gets questioned. But the place where a person spent time early on does affect what he dares to do later, what he knows, and who he knows. That is more worth looking at than the rank.

发布时间: 2026-10-31 03:30