That is what I like about this community as well. There are no artificial barriers to learning or to getting anything done.
Actually I think the barriers are still high. People are still hung up on credentials, and a team of startup founders from Harvard or Stanford always gets free publicity from the media and probably more investors as well.
The barriers are not high at Y Combinator. Most of the people we invest in are not from fancy schools. A Harvard degree suggests 3 good qualities in a founder: at least medium-smart, fairly ambitious, and won't be intimidated by VCs with Stanford degrees. But there are lots of other things I see in founder biographies that suggest the same qualities, so impressive academic credentials are by no means required.
I don't know where Biz Stone went to college, but his co-founder Evan Williams went to the University of Nebraska before making Blogger and Twitter. Twitter's inventor, Jack Dorsey, did go to the prestigious Missouri S&T before going to NYU.
But can you honestly say that something like Facebook would have gained the critical mass it had without essentially starting out as an Ivy league "Myspace" in an era dominated by Myspace and Friendster?
I don't see how that is relevant. You need to identify a target seed market at first. In Facebook's case, academia at Harvard was a good choice. I don't see a good reason why any of them had to go to Harvard to do that.
I don't see a good reason why any of them had to go to Harvard to do that.
I truly doubt Zuckerberg would have been able to convince people from Harvard to use Facebook back in it's inception without being from Harvard himself. Harvard is a seed market because it's Harvard. Podunk state college is not a seed market because people back then would rather have used one of the better existing solutions such as Friendster back then.
The only reason that I and many others joined back then was because of it's exclusivity. We would have used Friendster, Livejournal, or maybe even joined Myspace for the sake of a superior product.I am quite confident that Facebook would have died in it's infancy had it been created in some state college.
The whole exclusivity in the beginning was the sole reason that it was able to make it this far.
Well what if they launched somewhere else that was exclusive? Nothing pops to the top of my head I'll admit, but I haven't thought about it very long. There seem to be three key ingredients for the initial launch: exclusive, young/technically savy, and prestigious. LinkedIn is doing fine working with business professionals, although they have the benefit of people already understanding what a social networking site is.
On the other hand, when I say something remotely intelligent, I can get serious responses from people literally twice my age and ten times more experienced than I am. And they don't ask me for age or experience (unless it's relevant), they just take what I say at face value for the content.
Actually I think the barriers are still high. People are still hung up on credentials, and a team of startup founders from Harvard or Stanford always gets free publicity from the media and probably more investors as well.