Why is every successful tech founder an Ivy League graduate

Look at the top startups founded in the last couple of years, nearly every founder seems to come from an Ivy League school, Stanford, or MIT, often with a perfect GPA. Why is that? Does being academically brilliant matter more than being a strong entrepreneur in the tech world?

99% of fundraising is convincing people to like you. It's very easy to jerk off the insecurities of a venture capitalist by emphasizing how important you are as opposed to the business. A depressed rich person values you more for your perceived intelligence than they care about your technical merit. In the words of YC, they invest in smart people and not smart businesses.

Now, is any of that a smart policy? Not at all. It's basically an excuse to ignore due diligence. Good luck getting a retired Disney investor to care about the technical details of a digital-native product though.

It's more the people you get to meet at said schools, than actual academic achievements (or lack thereof)

Most VCs (YC included) makes it clear that they invest in people/teams, not ideas or the product. Picking people to fund is mostly a gamble anyway. So a lot of VCs or funds try to maximize their changes of success by looking at indicators like Ivy league schools. It is an indicator if all else is equal. Think of it this way. Would you be more inclined to fund either:

Team A: Ivy leaguers with an unknown idea/product

OR

Team B: No name people with an unknown idea/product or even a reasonable idea but too early to prove scale for VC funding.

So even though YC (and other VCs) doesn't reject people that not Ivy Leaguers (many have been funded), the bar is much higher for those people. It is the unfortunate reality. I personally don't see anything wrong with that. Every VC wants to maximize their chance of success in investing in startups which is already a gamble.

Because your filter of "top startups" likely already is filtering out all the bootstrapped success stories because "they are not startups". It is rejecting anything that succeeded via slow deliberate growth because they are not the "top", nor are they from the last couple of years. Your chosen filter shows you the people playing the VC game, and yes that game is mostly played by the same crowd who chooses the Ivy League.