Yes. The most important thing to us (or to me at least) is what the founders have built previously.
That begs the question, what about Google? A couple of first-time student founders taking on the hardest hitters in the industry with little more than a some ideas about how web search could work to show. (Presuming this was before they had a working prototype and even perhaps afterwards.) Perhaps a better question: At what point in their development would Page and Brin have been interesting? Or would a couple of Sta…
Being students in the CS PhD program at Stanford would have been enough to get them an interview. We don't put that much weight on where people went to college, but grad school admissions are a fairly meaningful test.
We wouldn't have counted it against them that they wanted to take on big companies. That kind of courage is exactly what we look for. When combined with rationality.