Why is every successful tech founder an Ivy League graduate | Hacker News Reader

Why is every successful tech founder an Ivy League graduate

13 pointsmoneyhungry21 comments

Look at the top startups founded in the last couple of years, nearly every founder seems to come from an Ivy League school, Stanford, or MIT, often with a perfect GPA. Why is that? Does being academically brilliant matter more than being a strong entrepreneur in the tech world?

View on HN

Most VCs (YC included) makes it clear that they invest in people/teams, not ideas or the product. Picking people to fund is mostly a gamble anyway. So a lot of VCs or funds try to maximize their changes of success by looking at indicators like Ivy league schools. It is an indicator if all else is equal. Think of it this way. Would you be more inclined to fund either:

Team A: Ivy leaguers with an unknown idea/product

Team B: No name people with an unknown idea/product or even a reasonable idea but too early to prove scale for VC funding.

So even though YC (and other VCs) doesn't reject people that not Ivy Leaguers (many have been funded), the bar is much higher for those people. It is the unfortunate reality. I personally don't see anything wrong with that. Every VC wants to maximize their chance of success in investing in startups which is already a gamble.

Because your filter of "top startups" likely already is filtering out all the bootstrapped success stories because "they are not startups". It is rejecting anything that succeeded via slow deliberate growth because they are not the "top", nor are they from the last couple of years. Your chosen filter shows you the people playing the VC game, and yes that game is mostly played by the same crowd who chooses the Ivy League.

This is correct. Tech founders have famously never dropped out of school.

Not to mention attended hippie-dippie colleges in Oregon...

It's more the people you get to meet at said schools, than actual academic achievements (or lack thereof)

> Look at the top startups founded in the last couple of years, nearly every founder seems to come from an Ivy League school, Stanford, or MIT, often with a perfect GPA.

Is that true? If I were to comb through recent YC batches, the startups would be dominated by Ivy+ grads or dropouts?

Or are you talking about VC-funded startups and those covered by startup media?

Something missing is the confidence that comes from being perceived that way as well. You're a high performer at a high prestige/competitive school - you're going to feel more like you can do everything the other successful people from that school can do compared to someone from a no-pedigree state school who wouldn't have access to those role models or tracks to see what's possible and be more likely to just go with the flow and accept a safe job offer.

Even if we assumed that there was nothing special about the capabilities of people who finish Ivy League educations, that's still a powerful effect. Add in that they are either competitive enough or have well connected enough families to get into said school, and it's a multiplying effect on top.

Not caused but correlated: doing something risky is much easier when you have something to fall back on - which I’d guess is a lot more common in the Ivies

It’s a social construct. The gatekeepers for money need to have some vetting of the founders. They have people they call at the big schools. The dude from SUNY Binghamton is an unknown unless someone can vouch.

The schools are super selective for people who are smart and can execute the strategy to get in, which is similar to sone aspects of the types of business VC want to incubate.

A common argument is: some mix of an advantage from prestige and selection effects where getting into Ivy League schools requires either wealthy, well connected parents, or a lot of ambition, hard work, grit, etc, and those qualities tend to lead to successful startups

1) that's not true 2) yes going to those colleges gives you a massive advantage in networking and in particular getting money from rich VCes who either went to those school or think they matter. the academics are irrelevant.

What data source and date range are you using to make this comparison?

from July 17 10:06 pm 2001 until July 10:07 pm 2001. It was the only time you had any common sense.

Networking and classism

Because they've got a strong network

What is your criteria for a startup to be a "top" startup?

Maybe Ivy League schools develop students for the job? My state school was known to develop students to “work” in Silicon Valley.

Those individuals with the highest grades are judged, by their professor’s grades, to be the most successful at that goal?

Plus, if you’re going to an Ivy League school, maybe your support network (parents, extended family and friends, mentors) is also operating at the same level. By growing up in that environment you have instilled in you the values or standards required for entrepreneurship. And don’t forget, if you’re going to find yourself in a jam, does that network have the knowledge and experience to help? Do they have disposable cash to make a mistake go away faster (years rather than decades). If life was unlimited and wellness undiminished by age, then I’m sure we’d have so many more 80+ year-old success stories.

It’s just life’s selection process, and each of these benefits make the possible outcomes more probable.

Stay in school. Don’t do drugs.

99% of fundraising is convincing people to like you. It's very easy to jerk off the insecurities of a venture capitalist by emphasizing how important you are as opposed to the business. A depressed rich person values you more for your perceived intelligence than they care about your technical merit. In the words of YC, they invest in smart people and not smart businesses.

Now, is any of that a smart policy? Not at all. It's basically an excuse to ignore due diligence. Good luck getting a retired Disney investor to care about the technical details of a digital-native product though.

It's almost as if we live in a rigged system not a meritocracy...lol

It’s unfair enough that the system makes you afford the rent in the Bay Area.

The smart thing to do is become a landlord in the Bay Area.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com