Somehow I don't think graduate students are in on this Valley subculture stuff.
Somehow I don't think graduate students are in on this Valley subculture stuff.
I think graduate school is actually a pretty good selector since many people attend graduate school because they are passionate about academia. I think Stanford is a good example of a source where graduate students have gone on to lead successful ventures in the valley.
Graduate school is certainly a good selector for invention: PhD school is all about research, and therefore invention, by definition. These folks in academia and in certain companies did found the hacker culture.
However, that hacker culture has now become strongly dissociated from Silicon Valley "hacker culture", which has by now become more about "innovation" and entrepreneurship than about actually building new, awesome stuff.
EDIT: It appears we're violently agreeing.