Anecdotal but:

I know fair few guy running start ups, and some who got into YC. I can say they are not the type of people who aspire to working in IB's with perfect resumes from elite universities. One got fired a few times, because he could not cope with the lack autonomy, and ended up in arguments with senior management. His doing quite well now. I can say his attributes that made him fail there, made him a success in someway with his own co-founded startup.

I say this as someone who did go to an elite university.

The point is that startup founders don't fit into cookie cutter models.

Some have top-tier resumes, some are drop-outs, some have a huge amount of domain expertise in their field and some are complete newbies. Many are somewhere in between.

It's bad for the startup community to push "founder-stereotype" myths because it discourages people who don't fit the stereotype and that's bad for everyone.

I actually agree with this.

But as it gets more popular(and competitive) I think diversty of startup founders will be smaller. And something will be lost because of it.

If we're not careful every startup founder will be from an elite background, from an elite family. Undiscovered talent will never be discovered.

Accelerators are going with the safe options, rather than potentials.

Start ups were one of the few ways people not from elite background could achieve massive success.

Completely disagree. The founders your talking about will provail no matter what. creativity, passion, inspiration isn't about money. True entrepreneur ship is about exploiting the flaws in the system. System changes and they find new flaws.

Is there evidence to support that accelerators are pre-selecting based on elite backgrounds? It would be really interesting to see YC's % of founders from Ivy league + Stanford over time.

Look at the EF Alumni. They are mostly from elite universities.

The people running EF are also elite, investment banks and management consultants. Which is probably why they hire, who they hire.

This is not surprising given British history. Culturally there is an overhanging bias towards credentials and elitism, however I get the strong feeling (as an American Co-Founder living in London the past 2 years) that things are definitely moving in the right direction here. Whereas Silicon Valley with its general west-coast counter cultural history is much more accepting but probably moving in the wrong direction as "startups" are mainstreamed and investors are looking for some signal in the noise of all the wannabes.

As usual though, successful founders must find their own way, and if they are dependent on being given a shot by some gatekeeper they probably never had much chance to be a successful entrepreneur anyway.

Investment banking means a specific thing, not merely having worked in finance.

None of your examples were investment bankers.

Bezos and Khan worked at hedge funds. Thiel worked as a derivatives trader. Wales was a trader. Schacter was a quant trader.

Pincus was an investment banker.

Among people who work in investment banks "investment banking" has a specific meaning (i.e IBD) but in general usage it's meaning covers the wider capital markets.

For example see the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_banking

While it is true that "investment bank" means a bank that does investment banking, investment banker does not mean an employee of an investment bank. A trader at an investment bank is no more of an investment banker than a backend software developer at the same institution.