WANT TO REALLY MAKE IT BIG IN TECH GO TO STANFORD OR HARVARD!

Okay I am not going to beat about the bush on this one. A lot of people are saying you can just come up with an old idea bounce it around and viola you get your company bought! You become the next instagram or the next facebook! Get real, if you reall y want to be the next facbeook or instagram, Valley connections pay and what I mean by that is you have to be on the scene period! Or at the least Cal Tech!

By and large, it is a network of young men, many who attended Stanford and had the attention of the world’s biggest venture capitalists before they even left campus.

Among this set, risk-taking is regarded as a badge of honor. Ideas are disposable: if one doesn’t work, you quickly move on to another. Timing matters. You make your own luck.

“There is some serendipity for entrepreneurs, but the people who are the rainmakers are the ones who entrepreneurs need to meet in order to make those connections that lead to success,” said Ted Zoller, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation who studies economic development around entrepreneurship. “The social ties that you make are directly correlated to success.”

For Mr. Systrom, the connections forged at Stanford were crucial.

I like how people say you just throw up an idea and people come running. They only come running once you foster that connection.

A colleague at Google, where Mr. Systrom worked straight out of college, introduced him to Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist who had already invested millions in Facebook. In the spring of 2010, even before Instagram was born, Mr. Andreessen wrote him a check for $250,000.

Okay so there you have it. Any one disagree?