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"Empirically, you're wrong about that. There are now over a thousand YC alums who prove you don't need it." Like Instacart (Amazon), Parse (Google), or Zenter (Amazon & GoDaddy)? Or going beyond YC, Twitter (Google), FourSquare (Google), Instagram (Google), Quora (Facebook), Asana (Facebook), Cloudera (Google, Yahoo, Facebook), YouTube (PayPal), Yelp (PayPal), Palantir (PayPal), SpaceX (PayPal), Tesla (PayPal), WhatsApp (Yahoo), StackOverflow (Microsoft), Android (Apple), EBay (Apple), NeXT (Apple), Nest (Apple), Amazon (D.E. Shaw), Oracle (Ampex), and Apple (Hewlett-Packard)? Empirically, having a "brand name" on your resume isn't necessary to found a great company, but it helps a lot. The companies above comprise almost all of the modern tech industry. The ones missing are almost all founded by founders recently out of a brand-name college or grad school: Google (Stanford), Microsoft (Harvard), Facebook (Harvard), Viaweb/YC (Harvard), DropBox (MIT), SnapChat (Stanford). |