Some MBA students have always wound up as entrepreneurs. Lately, they're even more bullish on startups.
That's according to a new study from Illuminate Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm, which shows MBA students are hugely optimistic about entrepreneurship as a career path. Illuminate surveyed 500 business school students at more than 20 schools, including Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, the Yale School of Management, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, throughout the first half of 2020, and published its results in January. More than 85 percent of students said they were interested in entrepreneurship as a career path.
"It blew my mind that so many were interested," says Cindy Padnos, founder and managing partner of Illuminate. Her firm regularly hosts MBA students as interns. Those students had repeatedly mentioned a high level of interest in entrepreneurship among their peers. Padnos wanted to know if the sentiment was widespread, or if it was confined to her interns and their friends, which prompted Illuminate to launch this study.