You miss my point entirely. My point is that people from Stanford have much more opportunity to progress, than people at a SJSU. Stanford is a much more affluent environment, thus potential entreprenuers have many more influential connections there. JFK Jr, when he was alive said when he was starting out his magazine, that because of his status he had enormous opportunities because of his status. The same philosophy applies to the Stanford environment. You, yourself, are proving my point. You don't know the people from SJSU, but you are assuming because the applicant has Stanford on their resume that the person must be of more value that the SJSU applicant. I understand the idea of coming from affluency and wanting to attend an elite school. However, there are many sharp minded kids, whose parents simply cannot afford the Stanford tuition. Thus, they are not exposed to influential connections in the way that Stanford students are. I'll go you one more; if venture capitalists would make attempts to reach students at state run schools, I'm sure they would meet just as many creative and intelligent students. Bottom line, the old saying, “it's not what you know, but who you know,” is still very relative today.

And as for hiring elites, what works for one company may not work for another. It's obvious that there are many combinatorial factors that go into brewing success. Each of the cases fore mentioned are good examples to learn from…and they happen to have a pattern of strong core values plus the appropriate leadership. The important lesson I'm getting from this article is that you should have them than not.

The article seemed to try to bring up issues on facebook (which you might think there is no much technology barrier, but as I said above, it's really not a problem for big company like facebook's current scale).

But if what Bernard mentioned, but not explicitly elaborated in the article, is true, that is a real problem.

Agreed. I never stated that Google was the first or only company to ask value-driven questions when hiring. Thanks!

The next Google needs to have their own technology too.

As Brin says:
“When it’s too easy to get money, then you get kind of a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley.”

Thus thanks to the CreditCrunch and the following TechCrunch the new leaders will emerge soon from the dust.