Palantir tops founder talent-density ranking at 16.5 per 1,000 staff, Yahoo surprisingly No. 3
deedydas · x · 2026-10-31
A new ranking of the top 50 most talent-dense breeding grounds for startup founders (by founders per 1,000 staff) puts Palantir first at 16.5 — spawning Wonderful, ElevenLabs, and Decagon — followed by Stanford at 14.2 (Anthropic, xAI, Prometheus) and the acquired Yahoo at a surprising 10.6 (ClickHouse, ElevenLabs).
Other notables:
- UC Berkeley 10.2, X 10.0, CMU 10.0, MIT 8.5; OpenAI at 2.9 with the highest pass rate (71%)
- Google DeepMind 5.6, Google 1.5, Meta 1.7, Microsoft 1.4, NVIDIA 0.9
- Israeli Military Intelligence makes the list at 2.9 (Exodo, Glow, Noma Security)
- McKinsey produced 227 alumni startups but with a 31% pass rate
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