>I think it's private schools in general.

I think CS is a little unusual in that places like Berkley are ranked highly. (Interestingly, Harvard has a rather low CS rank and Zuck was in the process of transferring to psych because he can't handle anything quant, but due to FERPA no one will call him out even as he repeatedly steps outside the law)

>Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though.

I think part of the issue is that a big chunk of startups are straight up grift. My complaints about gatekeeping aside, I think if I had a legitimately good idea I could either submit to yCombinator or talk to contacts who've cashed in stock and get investors.

That's mostly due to the fact I'm well known for valuing authenticity though and my personal brand is such that folks would take my proposal seriously.

I met a LOT of people who went to places like Stanford who basically... they always meet the metrics, at the expense of all else.

Anyways, I think in general we try to generate too many "startups" when we're really striving for small businesses.

But because the funding is the truly difficult part, we hyperfocus on that.

Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of startup ideas that while benefiting from the Ycombinator social network, have initial costs such that you could hit up a few rich friends who've known you a while with a solid business plan and get bootstrapped... but that would require domain knowledge and the respect of your peers, two things many founders lack ;-)