Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

It's interesting to see a credential effect here similar to universities.

Which credentials are the most valuable then? Which company as a new grad is most similar to Stanford, MIT?

I don't think it's so much "credentials" as opposed to being tied to a well-respected co + having experience navigating a co through hyper-growth + risk taking attitude.

I am an alum of one of these cos, and I suspect the makeup of the average employee as far as risk-taking goes (and again experience seeing a company go from nothing to $20b+) is much higher than an equally competent employee at, say, Microsoft or Amazon. There's a level of self-selection involved here.

Its easy to be cynical. It’s harder to recognize that any significant societal change is going to come with some identifiable downside and that those downsides aren’t automatically a reason to not make the change.

I think as far as credentials go, it's pretty simple: (market capitalization of the company) * (the level of responsibility given at the company).

The smaller the company is, the higher the position has to be to make the credentials stand out.

For instance, being a recent graduate at FAANG is probably more or less equal to being a pre-A series startup CTO, if there are no other entries in the CV.

This is the cycle of Silicon Valley at play, and an example why despite the Exodus of many entrepreneurs and engineers SV is still the leader in software based start ups.

Take the "PayPal mafia" for instance, out of one successful company spawned others -- SpaceX, LinkedIn, Facebook (via investment cash). These companies will spawn others, so on and so forth.

It's a cycle that feeds upon itself and has been a successful model, but it does have major flaws due to "hardcoded" pattern recognition.