Comment by VirusNewbie
2 years ago
This is super weird to me. In the tech circles I've run in, being from Harvard is about the same as being from UCLA or something.
I've never heard it considered a sign of exclusivity. CMU, Stanford, MIT, yes. But Harvard? It's not exactly known for a rigorous engineering program, and even less so the last fifteen years or so.
When looking for CEOs, they don't look for top notch engineering talent, they look for top notch CEO talent, where talent means capability. CEOs do need deep technical understanding, anything else and you have an enviroment that scares away engineers, but they don't need to be the best engineer in the entire company.
If you've been to Harvard, you are on a first name basis with highly ranking finance people. It's not a coincidence that among all the dot com carnage, Amazon emerged as the ecommerce champion: they lived thanks to Jeff Bezos being able to get continued funding despite making continued losses. For that, you need, among other things, good contacts into the finance industry and know how they work and think.
A membership in the exclusive club of Harvard graduates gives you the ability to find customers, advice, funding, employees. Stuff that makes it more likely that your company is more successful.
This sounds totally backwards, but I say this as someone who has no personal experience raising money, so maybe you're a VC or a founder?
If someone can get in front of VCs, presumably it doesn't matter if they know a bunch of other rich people from school. I really don't get the sense that VCs are impressed by someone's ability to convince some nepo hedge fund manager to invest a few million.
I think they're impressed by business accumen combined with technical chops. If you want to bootstrap, then yeah, maybe a school with the most amount of money matters so you can get a huge seed round.
But you think people with strong ideas and impressive technical backgrounds who get in front of VCs are going to be less impressive by less technical people who rub shoulders with finance bros?
Certainly Harvard/Yale is a good choice if you're going into medicine, law, or I dunno, maybe banking? But tech? I wouldn't think it's a top choice at all.
I'm neither VC or founder, what I wrote just bases on assumptions. It definitely helps my arguments I think that successful tech founders have went to Harvard, like Paul Graham, Bill Gates, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Mark Zuckerberg.