Look back 4 or 5 years prior to the founding of X.com/Confinity/PayPal: Elon Musk was a South African-born undergrad at Pennsylvania, Peter Thiel was a German-born lawyer trading derivatives at Credit Suisse, and Max Levchin was a Ukrainian-born undergrad at Illinois. Now, which comes first in Silicon Valley: merit or connections?
> Elon Musk was a South African-born undergrad at Pennsylvania
Who first emigrated to Canada, where he attended Canada's most prestigious business school for two years before transferring to the United States' most prestigious business school.
> Peter Thiel was a German-born lawyer trading derivatives at Credit Suisse
After which he ran his own hedge fund for two years, then co-founded PayPal.
These guys certainly had more merit than many people, but to hold them up as people who succeeded with merit over connections is silly.
Musk first arrived in Canada alone at 17 with very little money and worked manual labor jobs to make ends meet. When he first got to Silicon Valley he basically spent his first six months there locked away in his room coding the initial version of Zip2 which he co-founded with his little brother. What more do you want to decide someone succeeded by their own intelligence and drive as opposed to connections?
How about, can we agree that when you spend years achieving great successes, you tend to form relationships of trust with high-performing colleagues who learn to value your drive and intelligence and to look forward to helping you or working with you again?
That still seems like a boundary value at one end of the personal merit vs. connections continuum of drivers of success, as contrasted with the other end of the continuum, which we might define as being a VP at JP Morgan because your dad is on the politburo standing committee of the PRC.
Knowing how to do business networking is a talent and a skill that can be trained, so I would say being well connected is a subset of this thing called meritocracy.
