15% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation
Data as of
- People with a dated, completed doctorate
- 1,372
- Founded or led by 10 years after doctorate, 2010s (to 2016)
- 15%
- Same, 1960s
- 0%
How often do AI doctorate holders go on to found or lead a company or lab? We estimate that 15% of those with doctorates from 2010 to 2016 had reached such a role by 10 years after graduation.
Key findings
- For doctorates from 2010 to 2016, 24 of 158 people (15%) reached a founder or top role by 10 years after the doctorate.
- The corresponding estimate for the 1960s cohort is 0% (0 of 60 people).
- Across all dated doctorate holders, 7 people had reached such a role before the doctorate.
How the share changed
We count the first dated founding or top role at a company or lab. Top roles include chief executive, chief scientist and lab director. We exclude unfinished doctorates, use the earliest dated completed doctorate and show cohorts with at least 20 people.
Bars for 6 decades of doctorates, from the 1960s to the 2010s, with the share who had founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after the doctorate.
Source: People of Superintelligence career records from biographies and OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026. Doctorate year: the recorded end year of a completed doctorate, with cited biography evidence.
Data table
| Doctorate decade | People | Founded first | Top job first | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960s | 60 | 0 | 0 | 0% |
| 1970s | 127 | 4 | 0 | 3% |
| 1980s | 222 | 10 | 3 | 6% |
| 1990s | 343 | 8 | 1 | 3% |
| 2000s | 334 | 15 | 3 | 5% |
| 2010s (to 2016) | 158 | 21 | 3 | 15% |
We give each person at least 10 years of follow-up. In the cohorts shown, 1,176 of 1,244 people have no recorded founder or top role by that point. Among the 68 who reached one, 58 first entered as founders (85%).
Founders may enter our data because they started a well-known company, which can raise recent cohorts' shares.
How long the wait was
We also record 129 people in these same cohorts whose first founder or top role came more than 10 years after the doctorate. How long did it take among those who reached a role from the doctorate year on?
Dots for each person by decade of doctorate and years to the first founder or top role.
Source: People of Superintelligence career records from biographies and OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Data table
| Person | Doctorate | First role | Years | Organization | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Herbert Freeman | 1956 | 1997 | 41 | MapText | Founder |
| Joseph Mundy | 1969 | 2011 | 42 | Vision Systems Incorporation | Founder |
| Ross Overbeek | 1971 | 1998 | 27 | Integrated Genomics, Inc. | Founder |
| John R. Koza | 1972 | 1973 | 1 | Scientific Games Inc. | Founder |
| Chuck Rieger | 1974 | 1984 | 10 | Vidar Systems | Founder |
| Josef Kittler | 1974 | 2001 | 27 | OmniPerception Ltd | Founder |
| Robert Hecht-Nielsen | 1974 | 1986 | 12 | HNC Software | Founder |
| Janet Baker | 1975 | 1982 | 7 | Dragon Systems | Founder |
| John V. Guttag | 1975 | 2015 | 40 | Health at Scale | Founder |
| Lin-shan Lee | 1977 | 1991 | 14 | Academia Sinica | Director |
| Reid G. Smith | 1978 | 2014 | 36 | i2k Connect | Chief Executive |
| Jerry Kaplan | 1979 | 1981 | 2 | Teknowledge | Founder |
| Narendra Ahuja | 1979 | 2013 | 34 | Information Technology Research Academy | Founder |
| Salvatore J Stolfo | 1979 | 2011 | 32 | Red Balloon Security | Founder |
| Hans Moravec | 1980 | 2003 | 23 | Seegrid Corporation | Founder |
| Maria Petrou | 1981 | 2009 | 28 | Centre for Research and Technology Hellas | Director |
| Nicolas Gisin | 1981 | 2003 | 22 | ID Quantique | Founder |
| Norman Fenton | 1981 | 1998 | 17 | Agena Ltd | Founder |
| Rainer Blatt | 1981 | 2018 | 37 | Alpine Quantum Technologies | Founder |
| Richard P. Gabriel | 1981 | 1984 | 3 | Lucid, Incorporated | Founder |
| Rodney A. Brooks | 1981 | 1990 | 9 | iRobot | Founder |
| Zbigniew Michalewicz | 1981 | 2005 | 24 | SolveIT Software | Founder |
| Michel Devoret | 1982 | 1995 | 13 | CEA Saclay | Director of research |
| Mikhail J. Atallah | 1982 | 2001 | 19 | Arxan Technologies | Founder |
| Rachid Deriche | 1982 | 1998 | 16 | Realviz | Founder |
| David E. Goldberg | 1983 | 2010 | 27 | ThreeJoy Associates | Founder |
| Mark S. Fox | 1983 | 1984 | 1 | Carnegie Group | Founder |
| Liang Mong Song | 1984 | 2017 | 33 | Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation | Co-CEO and Executive Director |
| Shafi Goldwasser | 1984 | 2016 | 32 | Duality Technologies | Founder |
| C.C. Wei | 1985 | 2018 | 33 | Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company | Chief Executive |
| Ivar Jacobson | 1985 | 1987 | 2 | Objective Systems | Founder |
| Robert L. Grossman | 1985 | 1996 | 11 | Magnify, Inc. | Founder |
| Alex Waibel | 1986 | 1991 | 5 | C-STAR | Founder |
| Gunilla Borgefors | 1986 | 1989 | 3 | National Defence Research Establishment | Director of Research |
| Hugh Durrant-Whyte | 1986 | 2010 | 24 | National ICT Australia | CEO |
| Kai Li | 1986 | 2001 | 15 | Data Domain | Founder |
| Bernd Girod | 1987 | 1993 | 6 | Vivo Software | Founder |
| Carol Espy-Wilson | 1987 | 2014 | 27 | OmniSpeech | Founder |
| Isabel Trancoso | 1987 | 1990 | 3 | Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores | Founder |
| John M. Martinis | 1987 | 2022 | 35 | Qolab | Founder |
| Leonid Rudin | 1987 | 1988 | 1 | CogniTech | Founder |
| Peter Lee | 1987 | 2010 | 23 | Microsoft Research | Managing Director |
| Vijay Kumar | 1987 | 2017 | 30 | Exyn Technologies | Founder |
| Daniel S. Weld | 1988 | 1996 | 8 | Netbot | Founder |
| Isabelle Guyon | 1988 | 1996 | 8 | Coplinet | Founder |
| Jerry L. Prince | 1988 | 2002 | 14 | Diagnosoft | Founder |
| Stephane Mallat | 1988 | 2001 | 13 | Let It Wave | Founder |
| Andreas Dengel | 1989 | 1993 | 4 | DFKI | Scientific Director |
| Emmanuel Dupoux | 1989 | 1998 | 9 | Laboratory of Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics | Director |
| Fakhreddine Karray | 1989 | 2018 | 29 | Yourika | Founder |
| Gerhard Brewka | 1989 | 2008 | 19 | European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence | President |
| Qiang Yang | 1989 | 2012 | 23 | Huawei | Founding Director |
| Roland Siegwart | 1989 | 2018 | 29 | Sevensense Robotics | Founder |
| Alex Acero | 1990 | 2013 | 23 | Apple | Siri Chief Scientist |
| Ben Goertzel | 1990 | 2017 | 27 | Hanson Robotics | Chief Scientist |
| H. Sebastian Seung | 1990 | 2020 | 30 | Samsung | President |
| Haizhou Li | 1990 | 2003 | 13 | Science and Engineering Research Council | Principal Scientist and Research Director |
| Kenneth Richard Koedinger | 1990 | 1998 | 8 | Carnegie Learning | Founder |
| Marco Gori | 1990 | 2026 | 36 | UNaIVERSE | Founder |
| Ulrike Tillmann | 1990 | 2021 | 31 | Isaac Newton Institute | Director |
| Zhengyou Zhang | 1990 | 2019 | 29 | Tencent | Chief Scientist |
| Ming Zhou | 1991 | 2021 | 30 | Langboat | Founder |
| Adam Kilgarriff | 1992 | 2003 | 11 | Lexical Computing | Founder |
| Craig Boutilier | 1992 | 2012 | 20 | Granata Decision Systems | Founder |
| David B. Fogel | 1992 | 1993 | 1 | Natural Selection | Founder |
| Michael Black | 1992 | 2013 | 21 | Body Labs | Founder |
| Alon Halevy | 1993 | 2015 | 22 | Megagon Labs | Chief Executive |
| Amnon Shashua | 1993 | 1999 | 6 | Mobileye | Founder |
| David Doermann | 1993 | 2001 | 8 | Applied Media Analysis | Founder |
| Gary Marcus | 1993 | 2014 | 21 | Geometric Intelligence | Founder |
| Samy Bengio | 1993 | 1996 | 3 | Microcell Labs | Research director |
| Vivek Raghavan | 1993 | 2009 | 16 | Magma | Managing Director, India operations |
| Alberto Broggi | 1994 | 2009 | 15 | VisLab | Founder |
| Catholijn Jonker | 1994 | 2013 | 19 | National Network Female Professors in the Netherlands | President |
| Gary R. Bradski | 1994 | 2025 | 31 | Bonsai Robotics | Chief Science Officer |
| Ian Bremmer | 1994 | 1998 | 4 | Eurasia Group | Founder |
| Lisa Su | 1994 | 2014 | 20 | Advanced Micro Devices | President and CEO |
| Paul Viola | 1995 | 2014 | 19 | Highspot | Chief scientist |
| Shrikanth Narayanan | 1995 | 2013 | 18 | Behavioral Informatix | Founder |
| Steven M. LaValle | 1995 | 2013 | 18 | Meta | Chief Scientist |
| Zoubin Ghahramani | 1995 | 2017 | 22 | Uber | Chief Scientist |
| Amit Singhal | 1996 | 2026 | 30 | One 97 Communications | Non-executive Director |
| Anne-Marie Kermarrec | 1996 | 2015 | 19 | Mediego | Founder |
| Diego Calvanese | 1996 | 2017 | 21 | NOI Techpark | Director |
| Martin Riedmiller | 1996 | 2010 | 14 | Cognit | Founder |
| Xiaoou Tang | 1996 | 2014 | 18 | Sensetime | Founder |
| Daniel A. Lidar | 1997 | 2023 | 26 | Quantum Elements | Founder |
| Hany Farid | 1997 | 2024 | 27 | GetReal Security | Founder |
| Rémi Munos | 1997 | 2018 | 21 | Google DeepMind | Director |
| Tamara Kolda | 1997 | 2021 | 24 | MathSci.ai | Founder |
| Wei-Ying Ma | 1997 | 2021 | 24 | Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence | Director |
| Wiro Niessen | 1997 | 2012 | 15 | Quantib | Founder |
| Doug Burger | 1998 | 2023 | 25 | Microsoft Research | Managing Director |
| Hang Li | 1998 | 2017 | 19 | ByteDance | Director |
| Peter H. Stone | 1998 | 2015 | 17 | Cogitai | Founder |
| Trevor Blackwell | 1998 | 2001 | 3 | Anybots | Founder |
| Yoky Matsuoka | 1998 | 2017 | 19 | Nest | Chief Technology Officer |
| Alessio R. Lomuscio | 1999 | 2021 | 22 | Safe Intelligence | Founder |
| Ayanna Howard | 1999 | 2013 | 14 | Zyrobotics | Founder |
| Deb Roy | 1999 | 2008 | 9 | Bluefin Labs | Founder |
| Eric Poe Xing | 1999 | 2016 | 17 | Petuum | Founder |
| Ping Koy Lam | 1999 | 2008 | 9 | QuintessenceLabs | Founder |
| Yong Rui | 1999 | 2024 | 25 | Lenovo Group | President |
| Anton van den Hengel | 2000 | 2019 | 19 | Amazon | Chief Scientist |
| Doina Precup | 2000 | 2016 | 16 | AI4Good Lab | Founder |
| Gal Kaminka | 2000 | 2016 | 16 | BladeRanger | Founder |
| Giancarlo Fortino | 2000 | 2010 | 10 | SenSysCal | Founder |
| Ion Stoica | 2000 | 2006 | 6 | Conviva | Founder |
| James Kuffner | 2000 | 2016 | 16 | Toyota Research Institute | Chief Technology Officer |
| Li Juanzi | 2000 | 2019 | 19 | Zhipu AI | Founder |
| Nick Bostrom | 2000 | 2005 | 5 | Future of Humanity Institute | Director |
| Nikos Paragios | 2000 | 2017 | 17 | TheraPanacea | Founder |
| Paul Newman | 2000 | 2014 | 14 | Oxa | Founder |
| Latanya Sweeney | 2001 | 1981 | -20 | software consulting company | Founder |
| Lidong Zhou | 2001 | 2021 | 20 | Microsoft Research | Managing Director |
| Maja Pantic | 2001 | 2018 | 17 | Samsung | Research Director |
| Salil Prabhakar | 2001 | 2011 | 10 | Delta ID | Founder |
| Aggelos Kiayias | 2002 | 2017 | 15 | IOHK | Chief Scientist |
| Alex Karp | 2002 | 2003 | 1 | Palantir | Founder |
| Dawn Song | 2002 | 2018 | 16 | Oasis Labs | Founder |
| Elena García Armada | 2002 | 2013 | 11 | Marsi Bionics | Founder |
| Erik Learned-Miller | 2002 | 1989 | -13 | CORITechs | Founder |
| Qi Tian | 2002 | 2018 | 16 | Huawei | Chief Scientist |
| Yuval Noah Harari | 2002 | 2019 | 17 | Sapienship | Founder |
| Bowen Zhou | 2003 | 2021 | 18 | Frontis.ai | Founder |
| C. Lawrence Zitnick | 2003 | 2025 | 22 | FAIR (Meta) | Research Director |
| Darío Gil | 2003 | 2019 | 16 | IBM Research | Director |
| Kevin Scott | 2003 | 2017 | 14 | Microsoft | CTO |
| Brent Waters | 2004 | 2022 | 18 | NTT Research | Director |
| Jiaya Jia | 2004 | 2019 | 15 | SmartMore | Founder |
| Jingren Zhou | 2004 | 2022 | 18 | Alibaba | CTO |
| Kenneth Stanley | 2004 | 2015 | 11 | Geometric Intelligence | Founder |
| Marcello Restelli | 2004 | 2020 | 16 | ML cube | Founder |
| Barbara Caputo | 2005 | 2019 | 14 | European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems | Founder |
| Cédric Archambeau | 2005 | 2013 | 8 | Amazon | Chief Scientist |
| Christian Szegedy | 2005 | 2025 | 20 | Morph Labs | Chief Scientist |
| Christian Theobalt | 2005 | 2021 | 16 | Max Planck Institute for Informatics | Scientific Director |
| Jongwoo Lim | 2005 | 2020 | 15 | MultiplEYE | Founder |
| Fei-Fei Li | 2005 | 2024 | 19 | World Labs | Founder |
| Navneet Dalal | 2005 | 2010 | 5 | Flutter | Founder |
| Aaron C. Courville | 2006 | 2025 | 19 | IVADO | Interim scientific director |
| Ali Ghodsi | 2006 | 2013 | 7 | Databricks | Founder |
| Björn Schuller | 2006 | 2012 | 6 | audEERING | Founder |
| Gang Hua | 2006 | 2018 | 12 | Convenience Bee | Chief Technology Officer |
| Kristen Grauman | 2006 | 2018 | 12 | FAIR (Meta) | Research Director |
| Raquel Urtasun | 2006 | 2017 | 11 | Uber | Chief Scientist and Head of R&D |
| Ryan McDonald | 2006 | 2021 | 15 | ASAPP | Chief Scientist |
| Shuo Li | 2006 | 2006 | 0 | Digital Imaging Group of London | Founder |
| Tao Mei | 2006 | 2023 | 17 | HiDream.ai | Founder |
| Jaime Teevan | 2007 | 2018 | 11 | Microsoft | Chief Scientist |
| Jamie Shotton | 2007 | 2021 | 14 | Wayve | Chief Scientist |
| Jeff Leek | 2007 | 2025 | 18 | Cancer AI Alliance | Scientific director |
| Jingdong Wang | 2007 | 2021 | 14 | Baidu | Chief Scientist for Computer Vision |
| Piotr Dollár | 2007 | 2012 | 5 | Anchovi Labs | Founder |
| Roberto Navigli | 2007 | 2016 | 9 | Babelscape | Founder |
| Shai Shalev-Shwartz | 2007 | 2022 | 15 | Mentee Robotics | Founder |
| Andrew Rabinovich | 2008 | 2020 | 12 | Headroom | Founder |
| Davide Scaramuzza | 2008 | 2015 | 7 | Zurich-Eye | Founder |
| Kyogu Lee | 2008 | 2020 | 12 | Supertone | Founder |
| Ziad Obermeyer | 2008 | 2023 | 15 | Dandelion Health | Founder |
| Ashutosh Saxena | 2009 | 2015 | 6 | Brain of Things | Founder |
| Gjergji Kasneci | 2009 | 2017 | 8 | SCHUFA Holding AG | Chief Technology Officer |
| Demis Hassabis | 2009 | 2010 | 1 | Google DeepMind | Founder |
| Marc Deisenroth | 2009 | 2025 | 16 | Google DeepMind | Research Director |
| Ruslan Salakhutdinov | 2009 | 2026 | 17 | Sooth | Founder |
| Aniruddha Kembhavi | 2010 | 2024 | 14 | Wayve | Director |
| Antoine Bordes | 2010 | 2017 | 7 | Meta | Director |
| Dhruv Batra | 2010 | 2025 | 15 | Yutori | Founder |
| Ece Kamar | 2010 | 2026 | 16 | Turing | Chief Technology Officer |
| Zico Kolter | 2010 | 2019 | 9 | Robert Bosch | Chief Scientist of AI Research |
| Ali Farhadi | 2011 | 2017 | 6 | Xnor.ai | Founder |
| Lubomir Bourdev | 2011 | 2016 | 5 | WaveOne | Founder |
| Sami Haddadin | 2011 | 2017 | 6 | FRANKA EMIKA | Founder |
| Vijay Vasudevan | 2011 | 2023 | 12 | MintMCP | Founder |
| Wei Dong | 2011 | 2014 | 3 | Ann Arbor Algorithms | Founder |
| Marc Bellemare | 2012 | 2023 | 11 | Reliant AI | Founder |
| Chris Gibson | 2013 | 2013 | 0 | Recursion | Founder |
| Edward Grefenstette | 2013 | 2014 | 1 | Dark Blue Labs | Founder |
| Pierre Sermanet | 2013 | 2025 | 12 | UMA | Chief science officer |
| Radu Timofte | 2013 | 2026 | 13 | ELLIS Unit Franconia | Director |
| Bernardino Romera-Paredes | 2014 | 2025 | 11 | Hiverge | Founder |
| Han Hu | 2014 | 2026 | 12 | Winverse AI | Founder |
| Laurent Sifre | 2014 | 2023 | 9 | H Company | Founder |
| Luca Oneto | 2014 | 2018 | 4 | ZenaByte | Founder |
| Moustapha Cissé | 2014 | 2023 | 9 | Kera Health Platforms | Founder |
| Pratyush Kumar | 2014 | 2019 | 5 | AI4Bharat | Founder |
| Richard Socher | 2014 | 2014 | 0 | MetaMind | Founder |
| Sergey Karayev | 2014 | 2014 | 0 | Gradescope | Founder |
| Ashish Vaswani | 2014 | 2022 | 8 | Adept | Founder |
| Ce Zhang | 2015 | 2022 | 7 | Together AI | Founder |
| Stefano Ermon | 2015 | 2019 | 4 | Atlas AI | Founder |
| Yan Junjie | 2015 | 2021 | 6 | MiniMax | Founder |
| Animesh Garg | 2016 | 2024 | 8 | Apptronik | Chief Scientist |
| Georg Kucsko | 2016 | 2022 | 6 | Suno | Founder |
| Iz Beltagy | 2016 | 2023 | 7 | Spiffy AI | Founder |
| John Schulman | 2016 | 2025 | 9 | Thinking Machines Lab | Founder |
| Shaoqing Ren | 2016 | 2016 | 0 | Momenta | Founder |
| Thang Luong | 2016 | 2018 | 2 | VietAI | Founder |
| Alex Kendall | 2017 | 2017 | 0 | Wayve | Founder |
| Diederik P. Kingma | 2017 | 2010 | -7 | Advanza | Founder |
| Ji Zhang | 2017 | 2015 | -2 | Kaarta | Founder |
| Sam McCandlish | 2017 | 2021 | 4 | Anthropic | Founder |
| Brian Ichter | 2018 | 2024 | 6 | Physical Intelligence | Founder |
| Robert Nishihara | 2019 | 2019 | 0 | Anyscale | Founder |
| Sam Rodriques | 2019 | 2023 | 4 | FutureHouse | Founder |
| Simon Kohl | 2019 | 2023 | 4 | Latent Labs | Founder |
| Yang Zhilin | 2019 | 2016 | -3 | Recurrent AI | Founder |
| Yi Tay | 2019 | 2023 | 4 | Reka AI | Founder |
| Hao Zhang | 2020 | 2023 | 3 | LMSYS Org | Founder |
| Maithra Raghu | 2020 | 2022 | 2 | Samaya AI | Founder |
| Aravind Srinivas | 2021 | 2022 | 1 | Perplexity | Founder |
| Kiana Ehsani | 2021 | 2025 | 4 | Vercept | Founder |
| Daniel Levy | 2022 | 2024 | 2 | Safe Superintelligence | Founder |
| Jaime Sevilla | 2022 | 2021 | -1 | Observatory of Global Catastrophic Risks | Founder |
| Shengjia Zhao | 2022 | 2025 | 3 | Meta Superintelligence Labs | Founder |
| Alexander Meinke | 2023 | 2023 | 0 | Apollo Research | Head of Research |
| Tri Dao | 2023 | 2023 | 0 | Together AI | Chief Scientist |
| Chinasa T. Okolo | 2024 | 2025 | 1 | Technēculturǎ | Founder |
| Zhang Peng | 2025 | 2019 | -6 | Zhipu AI | Founder |
Recent cohorts have had less time to reach a role after a long wait. This can lower their observed median. The 10-year share gives each cohort a common cutoff.
Recent short paths
People with the most recent doctorates who founded or led a company or lab within 2 years:
- Chinasa T. Okolo: doctorate 2024, founded Technēculturǎ in 2025
- Alexander Meinke: doctorate 2023, became head of research at Apollo Research in 2023
- Tri Dao: doctorate 2023, became chief scientist at Together AI in 2023
- Daniel Levy: doctorate 2022, founded Safe Superintelligence in 2024
- Aravind Srinivas: doctorate 2021, founded Perplexity in 2022
- Maithra Raghu: doctorate 2020, founded Samaya AI in 2022
- Robert Nishihara: doctorate 2019, founded Anyscale in 2019
- Alex Kendall: doctorate 2017, founded Wayve in 2017
Career data comes from the biographies on this site and from OpenAlex author records, as of 15 October 2026. People whose OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mixed are left out of citation figures.