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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

I went to one of those "pitch nights" a few years ago. Honestly, because I heard there was free pizza, and it seemed interesting. I think maybe 10 startups went up to practice their pitch. A few of them were really impressive and had some traction already, I was personally impressed. Who was the only one to get one of the investors business cards at the end of their pitch? The MIT kids with the only idea that didn't have a business model. I left that night feeling pretty bitter. I always felt like the great part of tech was the possibility of upward mobility, but it seemed like an illusion that night.

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This is sad but true. Most of my local startups desperately want to hire students from top schools even just for short term internships to attract investors.

For better or worse, degree is a signal in a noisy world. Someone who went to MIT is on average more likely to be useful to an investor than someone who isn't. And perhaps this is true even if they have an awful demo or product. If they have tech skills, the investor can find them work elsewhere.

But in reality, pitch nights are generally garbage anyway. Investors put a lot of weight on "Who introduced the entrepreneur to me" and that carries more elitism than MIT. Again this is to get through all the noise.

If you have a project with traction and a large addressable market, the investors will follow the signal and stop worrying about pedigree.

> For better or worse, degree is a signal in a noisy world.

I think the contention is that it's not actually a signal, we just believe it to be true, and it's a confirmation bias.

Google recruiting would agree with you. They've de-emphasized school. :-)

My (limited) observation is it's one signal of many that is real, in a very noisy world. And 2-3 years post-graduation it's much weaker than other work related signals.

There are a couple of reasons why it's attractive to choose the MIT kids:

1) They presumably have other opportunities available to them that they gave up to pursue the venture. It's hard to gauge the passion of a founder if they couldn't have gotten a job at google instead.

2) Investors want innovative products that eventually turn into companies, which means they want smart people who have a cool idea and can tweak the model when needed rather than people who just follow a business plan. Snapchats business plan would have been horrible if they had one.

As for upward mobility, pedigree is not something you're born with. Anyone can go to MIT, Stanford, or Harvard (and they give out quite a bit of financial aid as well).

> pedigree is not something you're born with

This is a funny statement.

My dog was born with pedigree and he never gets VC business cards..

I assume you were down-voted because we should all be adopting shelter dogs.

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