This question presents a very false dichotomy: "Is the startup world a meritocracy, or are there leagues in startups?"<p>If we are making a sports analogy, then having different leagues does NOT imply that it is not a meritocracy. The very best (judged from merit) end up in the top leagues. Sports is the ULTIMATE meritocracy, in fact, because there is a simple and fair way to judge who is better.<p>Leagues just form so that that similarly talented people face each other in fair competition.
I have to at least somewhat agree with the article. I'm on the outside looking in, and to me it looks almost like working in the Federal Government, how once you're in then "you're in" for life with the Big League Startups.<p>Startups love to talk about their work as extremely technically challenging when in reality the developers I know who work at startups are generally no better or working on no harder problems than people not working at startups or working at startups that aren't very well known or 'in the big leagues'.<p>I think it really has to deal with the mentors the startups end up with and the funding, and together these help the "Big League" startups continuously be successful. Also, startups that are invested in by places like YCombinator naturally get more press and their business will have a higher chance for success (when combined with excellent mentors)....<p>You're free to disagree or correct me if I have any obvious misconceptions...Like I said..I'm on the outside looking in.
Hard to argue with this post. It really breaks out the "everyone can start a company" myth into something I've been trying to explain for a while.<p>The analogy I've been working with is comparing startups to the mid 2000s Poker boom - once the internet made it easier for anyone to play competitive poker, more and more people started doing it. Once one "regular guy" - Chris Moneymaker - won the WSOP and ESPN televised the hell out of it, poker rooms were flooded.<p>But who did you see still sitting back there taking in this new money? The same old guys who had been grinding out livings on the card table for years. The same guys you see regularly placing in the top 20 at WSOP events around the occasional flash in the pan newbies who get a hot streak.
You don't know what league you're in until you try. With sports, it's relatively easy to see why someone isn't a pro player - startup founders are harder to judge. In fact, judging the potential league of a startup is such a hard problem that even VCs, who are in the business of making such judgements, have to make a lot of rather unsafe bets.<p>How's a person to know they're not good enough? Should everyone who doesn't come into the game already rich and well-connected just stay away?
The saddest thing about the little tech world we live in, the one only WE care about, is that somehow seemingly smart people have managed to convince themselves that 1)this is a zero sum game, 2) you need rock star <i>any/everything</i> (what ever that means).
I can't stand reading posts like this anymore on HN. The title is literally the entire article.<p>Who knew the harder you work the more successful you are? I wish there were some sort of hypothesis. Grouping startups together, identifying what's unique/different, talking about founders, etc.