It's somewhat "ironic" that pg seemingly has a blind spot on this when the norm for startups is to start with a "family and friends" funding round. Most people

It's somewhat "ironic" that pg seemingly has a blind spot on this when the norm for startups is to start with a "family and friends" funding round. Most people don't have family and friends able to lend them a few thousand dollars, let alone tens of thousands, to invest in a complete moonshot (given that we all agree that most startups fail, i.e. lose the investment). This makes the startup scene extremely self-selecting. Even if you pretend that Elon Musk is a rags to riches story because he says he had to sleep in the office when he started out, he wouldn't have had the millions of dollars to invest in Tesla if he hadn't had an extremely lucky exit with Global Link and then again with X.com. Not to mention that he had previous access to both UPenn and Stanford, which also means massive networking opportunities (assuming he had access to those networks, which again requires a certain inherited status).