At the end of the decision making, do you feel many other great startups are being left out, due to the amount of startups you can only choose? Or you feel the others just don't have something going on.
If Larry and Sergey had done their post-graduate work in Moldova, the world wouldn't have Google. (Remember they shopped Page Rank to places like Yahoo, who didn't want it. As an idea, no one believed in it.) The connections at Stanford gave them access to capital which they otherwise would not have had, which allowed them to prove the concept. Without that funding, Page Rank would be just another dissertation.