"... It was not so easy 25 years ago for an ambitious person to choose to be judged directly by the market. You had to go through bosses, and they were influenc

"... It was not so easy 25 years ago for an ambitious person to choose to be judged directly by the market. You had to go through bosses, and they were influenced by where you'd been to college ..." What was the hack Apple, MS and other tech companies used? Aligning themselves to rapidly improving technology where greater performance was really noticeable? I still see the barriers described here occurring particularly in market bottle-necks (interfaces where technology collides with its ancestry) where old-world business has influence. The biggest one I can think of is access to capital. It seems the closer you get to capital, the greater the effect credentials can come into play balancing out performance. "... What cram schools are, in effect, is leaks in a seal. The use of credentials was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes in the seal. Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into credentials in the next ..." Is YC acting as an anti-cram school hack? Using YC credentials to gain leverage to gain capital to the next generation Startups to be measured by performance?