Investing in Liberal Arts Founders: Going Beyond the STEM-Liberal Arts Binary

Is it possible that investors have had it all wrong?

In recent years, venture investors have become ever more technocratic: it is assumed that technical expertise is more valuable than other types of knowledge and skills, at least when it comes to building innovative companies. The venture capital industry has been eager to back founders with technical credentials and engineering degrees — while entrepreneurs from liberal arts backgrounds have received a cooler response. This “STEM above all” attitude also affects how we perceive different fields at the university level. “What are you supposed to do with that degree?” is a question many would-be liberal arts majors hear from concerned parents.

In some sense, it’s understandable that the liberal arts are often seen as less valuable or practical than science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). At first glance, it’s difficult to see the practical value in, say, understanding the causes of the American Civil War, or dissecting the novels of Virginia Woolf.

This short-sightedness perilously ignores the value of the liberal arts and the skills, knowledge, and strengths of people with liberal arts backgrounds. STEM and the liberal arts aren’t diametrically opposed, and founders who think laterally, instead of along narrow, deep expertise in one field, have always been highly successful as founders. It’s not that liberal arts degrees are “better” than STEM degrees — it’s more a realization that narrow technical specialization isn’t the only path to entrepreneurship. A founder can be both a scientist and an artist.

Unique Strengths of Founders from the Liberal Arts

Getting a tech startup off the ground doesn’t only require technical expertise. This is particularly true in the early stages of a company, when a founder’s ability to form relationships can dictate the company’s fate.

People with liberal arts backgrounds have other forms of expertise to offer, too. Some of these skills and abilities include:

- Creativity

- Communication

- Open-ended problem solving

- Critical thinking and the ability to question assumptions

- Comfort with ambiguity and subjectivity (understanding that there is no one right answer)

- Seeing different perspectives as equally valid and identifying where they overlap

- Understanding what motivates people

- Building consensus

- Appreciation for and understanding of human factors (i.e., the relationships between humans and the systems they interact with)

- Artistic and design sensibilities

This is in no way to discount deep, narrow expertise in technical fields. Both are often necessary.

Prominent Founders with Liberal Arts Backgrounds

Founders with liberal arts backgrounds are everywhere. The classic example is Steve Jobs: he famously attended Reed College, but dropped out before obtaining a degree. He audited a class on calligraphy and credited the experience for influencing the multiple typefaces and fonts on early Macintosh computers.

Jobs was conscious of the value of the liberal arts. In 2011, at the launch of the iPad 2, he reflected on his company’s success:

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing,” he said.

Jobs isn’t the only founder with a liberal arts background. Stewart Butterfield, founder of team messaging and collaboration application Slack, studied philosophy at the University of Victoria and earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Cambridge. Other examples include Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group, who studied English in college; Palantir founder Alex Karp, who studied Social Theory at Haverford; Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann, who studied political science at Yale; and AirBnB founder Brian Chesky, who studied Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design.

University-Based Entrepreneurship

Advanced research at universities has always led to countless innovations. Google was created at Stanford; web browsers and plasma screens were developed at the University of Illinois; and the Human Genome Project was the result of research at several universities around the world. Between 2012 and 2017, the top three universities on a Reuters list — MIT, Stanford, and Harvard — filed for a combined total of nearly 3,500 patents. This demonstrates both the ingenuity and real-world impact of university research.

Given this level of innovation, it makes perfect sense for venture capital to look more closely at entrepreneurs at universities, whether students, faculty, or staff. Universities function as startup incubators: while a degree isn’t necessary to start a company, universities are places where smart people meet, test their ideas, and learn new ones. They have to room to experiment and take risks.

Perhaps most importantly, universities bring together people from both liberal arts and STEM backgrounds. They provide opportunities for STEM students to study Shakespeare, and English majors to take biochemistry. Before people are siloed into different careers, they meet and share ideas at universities, building the friendships and relationships that form the foundations of successful startups.

Universities can be a goldmine for venture capital funds that seek to back lateral thinkers who transcend the STEM-liberal arts binary.