I appreciate you sharing your story! It's cool to hear about your success and I definitely understand that it's different than some might think of it. Congrats! I'll try not criticize your narrative or how you frame it and focus on sharing how I think about mine instead.

I'm American, white, male, and got into an American college. I studied economics in school, got super stressed about my debt and income inequality. So I came to SF after college, doubled down on my debt with a bootcamp, and got a high paying engineering job. It was a big, stressful risk and paid off. I paid all my student debt off in a few months. My life has been an absolute dream since. I would never, never in a million years say this:

> ...our privilege mostly came from former underdogs choosing to bet on me

From working with those guys at the moving company I can tell you, seemingly small missteps lead to irreversible stagnation in traditional measures of success (career, achievement, wealth, etc). Let's cast all that aside though and just focus on demographics. Americans represent ~4% of the world's population. About 32% of Americans have graduated college. ALREADY I'm part of ~1% of the world's population and we haven't even included white/male. And I bet you like what half of SF engineers and YC founders fall in that population? Just incredibly disproportionate.

During the Great Depression stocks didn't rebound for 20 years. Over the last 20-40 years interest rates have steadily declined, ROI across the board has shrunk, and VC funds have proved highly profitable. All of that means that the last 20 years have been gangbusters for VC funding, SF, and software engineering. Had the next long protracted economic crisis hit during my job search, what would've happened? I was job searching for 6 months before I got my first job offer at a doctor's salary. What even is that!?

I worked hard, I was lucky, and I was successful. I don't even pretend to understand the cause and effect there.