If you're selling anything to a business and they've done any kind of research on you they will. And VCs definitely know. Sharing the same alma mater with a VC could make all the difference in funding.
Being able to raise funding is nice, but I could do that too, and I didn't attend Stanford.
The only question that matters to investors is, "Will the next Google or Facebook come out of Stanford?" If the answer is "No," then everyone investing in Stanford-related startups will lose.
There's a higher chance that the right talent, idea, and motivation might come together at Stanford, but it's far from likely. I don't know too much about elite universities, but the fact that Facebook originated from someone attending Harvard and Airbnb originated from an RISD alum is evidence that any university has a fair chance of starting the next hot company. Maybe even someone who hasn't attended university at all might start it.
Imagine if Google wasn't able to raise funding because someone was prejudiced against where the founders went to university, or whether they attended university. How different would the world be? That's why it's mistaken to place so much emphasis on Stanford. It shouldn't matter, except insofar as there's a lot of talent there.
Google may not be the best example... the founders went to Standford as well haha. I think the question comes down to, does the school give the unfair advantage or does the school attract smart people that are more likely to accomplish something great. I think its already accepted that there is a correlation.
The fact that Facebook, Airbnb, and Dropbox came out of other places suggests there isn't anything inherently special about Stanford, except that there's a lot of talent there.
I think the question comes down to, does the school give the unfair advantage or does the school attract smart people that are more likely to accomplish something great. I think its already accepted that there is a correlation.
It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.
Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. [6]
[6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools is to trick admissions officers. They also generally provide a better education. But try this thought experiment: suppose prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001) negative effect on college admissions. How many parents would still send their kids to them?
It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year.
(I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.)
-----------
I'm going to go with "unfair advantage," but there are a lot of smart people there too.
It could, but you know what makes even more of a difference--to the business? Having customers and recurring revenue.
I know that funding is kind of like a nice additional checkbox on your list of upper-middle class elite treadmill objectives, but outside of sanfranistan we've somehow managed to build entire empires of real value without having to rely on venture capitalists who happened to get drunk in the same dorms that we did.
So, the assertion was "may make you more successful in funding"--you're moving the goalposts to "successful" after the fact.
Success and funding are not necessarily correlated, right? We saw that back in the 90s and are seeing it again.
I don't disagree that having these connections can ease certain parts of the fundraising (and even customer acquisition!) process--that said, I'm concerned that the emphasis placed a lot of times in the ecosystem is on funding and not the boring part of, you know, business.
My cynicism stems from the fact that, to me, the hip path these days has you going to an Ivy-league school or Stanford, starting a company, going through a well-known accelerator, raising funding from VCs, and then -~=magic startup time=~-. And for a lot of people, this path isn't about actually doing business--it's simply the thing that they're supposed to do and which it is implied is expected of them. All the while, spouting rhetoric about how they're going to "change the world" by chasing the same boring set of business concepts. I find it irritating.
It's not the Stanford (or Harvard, or USC, or Ohio State) education that really matters -- it's the people you meet. Going to a school that's a nexus for your industry puts you around people who are driven and knowledgeable about similar topics and is what leads to professional growth and opportunities.
(This is something that online education misses entirely and will largely never be able to replicate.)
Granted that watching instructional videos online doesn't (at least in and of itself) accomplish the goal of meeting driven and knowledgeable peers, but if that's the real goal, then let's focus on it, because there are ways to achieve it that are orders of magnitude more efficient (in both money and life) than trying to get into Stanford.
