Are entertainment and politics more meritocratic than startups?
And, before I begin, let me say that I'm not accusing anyone, from pg & the YC team, to angels, to venture capitalists (all of whom I greatly admire) of anything. I am simply stating an empirical observation.
So, to ask the question: Are politics and entertainment more meritocratic than startups? This might seem absurd, until you look at the data, and, as it turns out, there's quite a bit of data.
For example, take a look at the Wikipedia list of people who went from "rags to riches" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rags_to_riches). This is, of course, not a complete list or a statistically random sample, but the trend is obvious: it's mostly entertainers and politicians. The only person on there who's arguably a startup founder is Larry Ellison, and his company is much less of a technology company than a sales company. There are founders of other kinds of businesses- Sheldon Adelson, the casino baron, and Lakshmi Mittal, the British/Indian steel baron, to name two- but no technical startup people.
To approach it from the other direction, look at the most famous startup founders. Bill Gates- his father was a name partner at the largest law firm in Seattle, Preston, Gates & Ellis. Larry Page and Sergey Brin- their parents, all four of them, were top computer science or mathematics professors. Michael Dell- he started his company with a $500,000 loan from a relative. Mark Zuckerberg- his parents were both doctors. There are, of course, exceptions, but the general rule seems to be in this direction.
Or, to take a third angle, look at any list of orphans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famous_orphans, http://thirdworldorphans.org/gpage.html34.html, and many more). There are lots of politicians and entertainers and demagogues and novelists, but very few startup founders (and scientists, for that matter); Steve Jobs is the only one I was able to find, but he was so young when he was adopted that he has no memories of his biological parents.
So, what do you all think? I've only been able to list famous people here, because those are the ones I can look up, but any investors reading this probably have a better data set- what have you found?