Bingo. There's a set of something like ten schools from which Silicon Valley companies hire.
If you're not from one of those, you will be cordially invited to eat shit.
To be fair, we aren't a SV startup, but we've always had an equal engineering presence there (probably 120 engineers there now vs maybe 30 in 2018).
It completely blew my mind, to be honest (and I do see similar weirdnesses in the way US colleagues review CV's, so I don't think it's only a FAANG thing).
I responded to GP's comment about hiring. Ivy-like pedigree surely helps for any career path, but that's no different for SV or anywhere else.
If there's any lesson to learn from this thread I guess it's that no amount or level of credentials can overcome cultural biases, racism, and discrimination.
I would say that banking in Europe is much better developed than in the US. In the US, we still have checks and you need to pay for wire transfers (what???). Doing taxes in the US is 10 times more complicated than it is in Europe, and CPAs are only interested to doing them for you if you are a cookie cutter case and easy to make money off. Otherwise, good luck getting a call back. That doesn't happen in Europe. You hire an accountant, he does his job.
Entrepreneurship in the US is not easier than it is in Europe, IMHO. Raising money or scaling might be easier.
In my experience, I've been dealing with constant discrimination in the US. It is claimed that where you are from or what your social status is, doesn't matter, in silicon valley (or California in general). People are nice, they smile, but it's mostly fake. You remain a foreigner, who should still work for less pay than those who grew up locally and went to an ivy league school, even though you have the same credentials and graduated at a top school in Europe (in my case, I have an ivy league degree on top of that).
Raising money in the US? No different than in Europe, at least in my experience. Again, no network = no raise. And you will need to overcome the above discrimination or at least the idea that you might "go back" any time, even if you are a permanent resident.
All this sounds brutal, and maybe hard to take, but I just say it like it is, and I prefer to be honest and straightforward and share my first hand experience.