SiliconBeat

With millions of users and more joining every second, LinkedIn has become a data nerd’s delight. And it allows for intriguing experiments like the one recently conducted by Monica Rogati, LinkedIn’ senior data scientist.

Rogati was curious: What could that rich set of data tell her about the factors that go into making an entrepreneur? Or, as she put it in a study released today, “Sequencing the Startup DNA.”

If there was a big surprise for her, it was this:

“Geography matters, even if you like to think it doesn’t,” Rogati said. “Even if you like to think starting a company is democratic and the world is flat.”

Rogati basically took about 10,000 profiles of people who had started companies in some fashion. Interesting to note that only about 2 percent of those people go on to start another company, becoming so-called serial entrepreneurs.

But looking at geography, the most likely place someone will start a company is San Francisco. Indeed, someone is twice as likely to start a company in SF as they are in New York. And in turn, they are twice as likely to start a company in NY as they are in Boston.

The data on age is also interesting: 40 percent of founders were between 30 and 39 years old; 20 percent between 40 and 49; only 34 percent between 20 and 29. That means that over 40 percent were over 30, which challenges the conventional wisdom about startups being a game for the young.

The other data point likely to get tongues wagging is the schools where founders are mostly likely to come from. Number one is Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, followed by Harvard’s biz school, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, MIT Sloan, and Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

There’s other data in there, of course. Check it out and post any other thoughts below.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg (pictured) resigned from the board of directors at eHealth Wednesday “so she could devote more of her time toRan personal and professional obligations,” according to a filing the online health insurance company made Friday announcing her replacement on the board, Stanford Chief Financial Officer Randall Livingston.

Sandberg once served as chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department during the Clinton Administration under Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who has been named President-elect Obama’s chief economic advisor. Between Treasury and Facebook, she worked at Google, serving as vice president in charge of online sales and operations. She was also instrumental in launching Google’s philanthropic arm, according to her Facebook bio.

Jen-Hsun Huang, the founder and chief executive officer of graphics chip-maker Nvidia, will donate $30 million to help build a “modern and sustainable destination for education and research” at Stanford’s school of engineering, according to a Stanford press release.

To be called the Jen-Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center, the 130,000-square-foot building is already under construction and expected to be completed Read the rest of this entry »

The Mercury News editorial page had a great column today from three experts on genetic testing that provides the medical perspective on why a physician should be involved in the direct-to-consumer genetic testing process. They argue that these are indeed medical tests, despite industry arguments otherwise. And the results are complex.

I wrote about this subject last Sunday in my Merc Column. That followed on the news that 13 of these firms had received cease and desist orders until investigators could determine whether they were complying with state health regulations.

The column today was written by David Magnus, director of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics; Mildred Cho, director of the Stanford University Center for Integrating Research on Genetics and Ethics; and Dr. Robert Cook-Deegan, director of the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy’s Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy. They write:

“Some of the companies clearly have no physician involved in ordering the tests. At least one company has claimed to be in compliance with the law because a physician who works for the company reviews all customer orders. This response is clearly not sufficient. The point of the law is to ensure that each patient (or customer) has a physician looking after their interests when ordering any medical tests. A physician working for a company trying to sell tests is clearly not well-situated to look after a patient’s best interest.”

I agree. Read the rest of the column here.

In a study titled “Who’s Watching the Watchdogs?” that “is likely to be controversial,” Stanford said Monday it has found evidence that “questions the value of the ratings” of all four of the major shareholder advisory firms, according to a press release put out by the Rock Center for Corporate Governance, made up primarily of faculty from both the Stanford Law School and its Graduate School of Business.

These firms claim they are “able to predict future performance by performing a detailed analysis encompassing many variables culled from public sources,” according to the release, a claim the study tends to debunk. Read the rest of this entry »

Speaking this weekend to the graduating class of the Stanford School of Medicine , which turned 100 this year, Nobel laureate Roger Kornberg, a professor of structural biology at the school urged the graduates to consider dedicating themselves to research.

Kornberg (pictured), who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discoveries of how DNA is converted into RNA — a process known as transcription — has been meeting with national lawmakers to discuss the importance of continuing to fund scientific research. Here are excerpts of his remarks Saturday: Read the rest of this entry »