>non-meritocratic who-you-know culture instead of one that optimizes producing good products. [...] To me, the "who-you-know" is not that difficult a bar. It'

>non-meritocratic who-you-know culture instead of one that optimizes producing good products. [...] To me, the "who-you-know" is not that difficult a bar. It's just basically playing the game of 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon[1] in real life. The comments from tlb and nugget are ideas of how to do this. It does not mean you had to be one of Marc's classmates at the University of Illinois. >Many founders can't get that kind of access, often due to class or other systemic factors. I think this can be a point of good discussion. Can you list some of those impossible obstacles to networking into people like Marc? Which class of programmers writing apps for the internet or the mobile space can't get access to SV VCs? [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation