What's your point? Others can raise money more easily than you can, due to some ambiguous idea that investors prefer these other people from Stanford? No one that is going to build a successful company should care about that. Because you're 10x better than the competition. The lack of an inherited advantage isn't going to make the difference between success and failure for you.

> What's your point?

In Silicon Valley, affiliation to established institutions - schools, conglomerates, social circles - correlates with access to early-stage capital much more strongly than it correlates with actual performance as an entrepreneur.

This is bad for two reasons:

1) Silicon Valley investors, as a group, are wasting capital by investing too much in low-performing insiders, and not enough in high-performing outsiders.

2) Silicon Valley entrepreneurship amplifies social inequalities instead of reducing them, because a disproportionate share of entrepreneurial opportunities are reserved for insiders.

Solomon Hykes. Another inspiring example of an "outsider" succeeding in Silicon Valley.

I don't know about successful - Docker still has to prove that it can build a large sustainable business. Obviously I am bullish on the opportunity :)

I definitely was a complete outsider when I moved to Silicon Valley: first generation immigrant, with no affiliations or credentials whatsoever, no traction, and a lot of personal debt. If YC hadn't taken a chance on us and written that $17,000 check, we probably would have never made it this far. And I had it easy compared to other outsiders: I had US citizenship, my english doesn't betray I'm a foreigner, and of course I'm a white male.