Harvard Alumni CEOs Lead IPO Survey of 2014: MBA News

By Tim Dhoul Updated Feb 16, 2015

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Introduction
Harvard Business School graduate behind US$12 billion IPO

Harvard alumni were last year's IPO leaders

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Harvard alumni led the way for helming companies that made a big impression on last year’s stock market.

A total of seven Harvard University alumni, of which two were Harvard Business School graduates, were CEOs of companies that made over US$100 million when they entered public trading with an initial public offering (IPO) in 2014.

Harvard alumni easily outnumbered those of any other university in this regard, as they have done for at least the past three years, according to an analysis carried out by data firm, Equilar.

Harvard University’s seven puts it some distance ahead of the three alumni CEOs representing Columbia, Stanford, Texas Tech and the University of North Carolina respectively. In total, 84 institutions were represented among an estimated total of almost 300 IPOs, but only 14 produced more than one alumnus that fulfilled the criterion of crossing the US$100 million threshold.

Harvard Business School graduate behind US$12 billion IPO

One Harvard Business School graduate who did fulfill the IPO criterion was Michael Carpenter, CEO of Ally Financial when it made US$12 billion in stock sales on its first day of trading in April 2014. However, the MBA graduate has since stepped down as CEO of the financial services firm.

The US$12 billion figure was the highest registered among the group of Harvard alumni, but one that was far from being the highest altogether – an honor reserved for Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group, the IPO of which achieved a record-breaking US$25 billion after going public in September.

In Equilar’s institutional survey, Harvard alumni have also seen their company’s stock perform better than their peers, on average, since the date of their company’s IPO. Gains in a stock’s value from launch to the end of 2014 averaged 74% among the seven Harvard alumni – ahead of the admittedly smaller groups from the University of North Carolina (39%) and Stanford (37%). Even so, these gains far outweigh the 9.6% measured by the FTSE Renaissance US IPO index, a tool that tracks track the performance of IPOs subsequent to their launch.

Written by

Tim Dhoul

Tim is a writer with a background in consumer journalism and charity communications. He trained as a journalist in the UK and holds degrees in history (BA) and Latin American studies (MA).