Actually I think the barriers are still high. People are still hung up on credentials, and a team of startup founders from Harvard or Stanford always gets free publicity from the media and probably more investors as well.
Traction solves all other problems. Make something people use.
Tumblr's David Karp dropped out of high school.
I truly doubt Zuckerberg would have been able to convince people from Harvard to use Facebook back in it's inception without being from Harvard himself. Harvard is a seed market because it's Harvard. Podunk state college is not a seed market because people back then would rather have used one of the better existing solutions such as Friendster back then.
The only reason that I and many others joined back then was because of it's exclusivity. We would have used Friendster, Livejournal, or maybe even joined Myspace for the sake of a superior product.I am quite confident that Facebook would have died in it's infancy had it been created in some state college.
The whole exclusivity in the beginning was the sole reason that it was able to make it this far.
That is what I like about this community as well. There are no artificial barriers to learning or to getting anything done. You don't need credentials or permission. It is in your hands.