have PhDs,
and over a third are assistant,
associate or full professors
with major universities.
Only time will tell
if this is a new trend of seeing academics
in technology startups.
But I got pretty curious
to find out if this is common or new.
And it turns out this is somewhat new.
Only over a year ago,
researchers at the University of Maryland
found a 38 percent decline
at the rate of startup formation
or share of employment by US PhDs
over the past 20 years.
Yet our attendance here today
and the trend in AI technology broadly
does not seem to correlate
with this finding.
As I said, only time
and more data will tell.
In the meantime, my curiosity
led me to another question:
What was the last major technology company
founded by academics?
Google.
At Perplexity, we get accused
of trying to kill Google a lot.
(Laughter)
But trust me, we're not really
trying to kill things.