[biznickman]

I'm just saying from my experience, when I came here I was able to easily connect with other top execs at events around the bay. The main point is that Steve Jobs & Wozniak, Sergey and Larry, these guys were all accessible at some point and participated in the community. Jobs doesn't exactly participate in events anymore, yet many highly successful people show up at events of all types. That sort of contribution to the community from more "successful" individuals is exactly how SV was built.

I should also add that I'm not suggesting that exclusive events are alone the source of the problem. They can even be useful in some cases. I'm simply stating that exclusive events are not useful when you are trying to build a community of any type (in Facebook's case it's a community of developers).