They're not, but I can see his point. VCs often look for an educational pedigree when deciding who to fund. Here is a great example: http://recode.net/2015/12/0

They're not, but I can see his point. VCs often look for an educational pedigree when deciding who to fund. Here is a great example: http://recode.net/2015/12/03/venerated-vc-michael-moritz-opens-mouth-inserts-foot-on-question-about-hiring-women/ http://recode.net/2015/12/03/venerated-vc-michael-moritz-ope... He's talking about why he hasn't hired any female VCs, but the pattern exists with top VCs in both hiring partners and funding founders. He says: "We just hired a young woman from Stanford who’s every bit as good as her peers. And if there are more like her, we’ll hire them. What we’re not prepared to do, is to lower our standards." Which says, to me (a state college dropout) that I'd get nowhere with this guy if I wanted to be a VC at his firm. Now, is it fair that they do that? Is it right? I don't think so--but the pattern unfortunately exists. Here is an interesting thread from Sam Altman's AMA about the same issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315113 sama: "We looked at our data here last year--we fund founders from a very wide variety of schools, and no school at all, but many of our most successful founders went to 'top schools' and thus it's easy to get the mistaken impression we select for that."