OK so your post boils down to "VCs want to see growth or prestige". It's actually that they want to see customers and revenue, not necessarily growth. And so the sentence "VCs want to see revenue and customers or prestige" is completely reasonable.
Look, if you're a VC who goes to those "clubs", and you trust the people there and are comfortable giving them your money, _great_. Why should they be handing it out to you, with your no-revenue company and no prior associations?
> [...] the sentence "VCs want to see revenue and customers or prestige" is completely reasonable.
It's reasonable when prestige is earned through individual achievements. But most of the time it's earned through affiliation. Complete outsiders can succeed, certainly - but the bar is much higher for them.
What's your point? Others can raise money more easily than you can, due to some ambiguous idea that investors prefer these other people from Stanford? No one that is going to build a successful company should care about that. Because you're 10x better than the competition. The lack of an inherited advantage isn't going to make the difference between success and failure for you.
In Silicon Valley, affiliation to established institutions - schools, conglomerates, social circles - correlates with access to early-stage capital much more strongly than it correlates with actual performance as an entrepreneur.
This is bad for two reasons:
1) Silicon Valley investors, as a group, are wasting capital by investing too much in low-performing insiders, and not enough in high-performing outsiders.
2) Silicon Valley entrepreneurship amplifies social inequalities instead of reducing them, because a disproportionate share of entrepreneurial opportunities are reserved for insiders.
I don't know about successful - Docker still has to prove that it can build a large sustainable business. Obviously I am bullish on the opportunity :)
I definitely was a complete outsider when I moved to Silicon Valley: first generation immigrant, with no affiliations or credentials whatsoever, no traction, and a lot of personal debt. If YC hadn't taken a chance on us and written that $17,000 check, we probably would have never made it this far. And I had it easy compared to other outsiders: I had US citizenship, my english doesn't betray I'm a foreigner, and of course I'm a white male.
Why not base it on the actual product and skills/experience of the founders, like they claim they do?
Palmer Luckey would have trouble getting funded with his VR headset in his hands, based on his background. VCs would sooner fund anyone that went to the same school they did.
Look, if you're a VC who goes to those "clubs", and you trust the people there and are comfortable giving them your money, _great_. Why should they be handing it out to you, with your no-revenue company and no prior associations?