The reason tech tends to compare vs FANG is that the "canonical" startup is founded by a Stanford or Harvard graduate and hires friends/employees exclusively fr

The reason tech tends to compare vs FANG is that the "canonical" startup is founded by a Stanford or Harvard graduate and hires friends/employees exclusively from Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT. This was certainly the case for the tech focused breakouts in the last few decades (FB, Google, Dropbox, Palantir, Stripe). Given these are the example startups, every one of those employees more or less had a FANG offer as a backup.