"Born into the club" is probably overstating it.

"Pay your dues", perhaps, but competent person -> funded (or employee at funded company, or just someone known for doing something awesome) -> EIR, could be 2-4 years.

VCs are probably less stupid about credentials than e.g. Google under Mayer with the "core schools" crap. Maybe less stupid than "core schools" in admittance. I suspect being a Thiel fellowship person, a core developer on a really popular open source project (nginx dude for sure, probably Ver if he wanted to do something in bitcoin on his own, etc.) would be more than adequate. Or YC/500 Startups/etc.

I don't think that being an employee at a funded company gets a person anything. Companies don't just let engineers have investor contact. The one case I saw where an engineer got investor contact was someone who was so unethical and incompetent that he got his mentor (the CTO) fired. (This was that startup from hell that I worked at in the winter of 2011-12. Initials TSS.)

You basically have to play degenerate political games to get investor contact as an employee of a funded startup. It really is a two-class world these days.

My experience is based on what I've seen in New York, but everything I've heard about the Valley is that it's the same. Well-connected douches will always have a competitive advantage over real people. We get our shot when tech becomes uncool/nerdy again and those assholes go back to whatever douche Valhalla they return to.

That's different from my experience in Silicon Valley, although I've never worked in NYC. As an employee at a post-Series A company in an industry I knew approximately fuck-all about (Internet advertising for Facebook), the CEO introduced me (and other engineers) to VC partners and press whenever they visited, and if I'd had anything interesting to talk to them at the time, could have (and that same guy is happy to introduce me to people now, years later). This was at a ~25 person company. I could see it being less common at a 400 person company, but probably more common at a 5-10 person company.

I've seen other companies with a variety of weirdly dysfunctional ways of treating employees, but what's the Tolstoy quote? "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." If you have a decent network in Silicon Valley, and/or are willing/able to bounce once a situation seems bad, it's pretty easy to stay in "Happy families" only.

It sounds like you met a lot of good people. Unfortunately, the bad kind seem more common, at least from where I'm standing.

I don't think Silicon Valley vs. New York has a lot to do with it.

The problem is that when you run into bad people and they ruin your career or steal your future, then good people don't want anything to do with you (or, at least, have you at arms' length, and that gets annoying) so you get a string of more bad people (who are always happy to take advantage of your weakened position).

Maybe the good people would be a bit less likely to keep you at arm's length if you didn't come off as assuming by default that founders and VCs are out to get you, which is pretty annoying and self destructive.