Venture Capitalist to Harvard Business School Entrepreneur Wannabees: "It's really unfair to you guys, but I think you're discriminated against now,"

From Fortune Magazine's Term Sheet:
Is Chamath right about HBS entrepreneurs?

Not too many 'unicorns' went to HBS. Or any other business school.
FORTUNE -- Venture capitalists are biased against would-be entrepreneurs who graduated from Harvard Business School.
That was the message imparted top current HBS students at a conference keynote this past weekend by Chamath Palihapitiya, a current venture capitalist and former Facebook (FB) executive. From DealBook:

"It's really unfair to you guys, but I think you're discriminated against now," Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder of the venture capital fund Social+Capital Partnership... "I would bet a large amount of money that the overwhelming majority of us would not look favorably on a company started by one of you."

It's a fascinating message, particularly given how many venture capitalists once attended HBS (including one of Palihapitiya's partners, Mamoon Hamid). And it is virtually impossible to prove or disprove scientifically, without access to all of the business plans that have reached VC desks without affirmative reply.

One thing we can look at, however, is how many highly-valued startups have been founded by HBS grads.
To do so, I pilfered Aileen Lee's list of "unicorns" -- a group of 39 tech companies founded since 2003, and which were valued at $1 billion or more by the private or public markets (note: her list has not been updated since last November).  

Of those 39 companies, only three had at least one co-founder who went to HBS. They were:

• Yelp: Jeremy Stoppleman (HBS 2005, but dropped out)
• Zynga: Mark Pincus (HBS: 1993)
• Gilt Groupe: Alexis Maybank (HBS 2004), Alexandra Wilkis Wilson (HBS 2004)

But this isn't just an HBS issue. Only 11 of the 39 companies had any MBAs within their co-founding teams (i.e., just 28%) and, of those, only four had multiple MBAs. The leader (barely) is Stanford, with MBAs at five unicorns (Homeaway, Fab.com, Marketo, Tableau Software and Workday)...MORE

Two points.
1) See also "Are Stanford Grads Good Investments?".
2) This whole focus on unicorns is just silly. The best advice for an entrepreneur is "Fail Forward Fast" develop the good ideas as far as they will go and leave the Unicorns to Climateer as his double secret coded message to the cognoscenti that the market has topped out, as in:

note to self: maybe drop the rainbow and butch up the unicorn