The board members and initial contacts have much to do with the initial clients and the network effect it creates. It doesn’t matter if you have an excellent product. Without the initial boost of early adopters, you’ll struggle to survive. That’s why many founders go to SV or well-known startup incubators: the networking it creates is priceless. Of course, you’ll need to create a valuable product -and that’s the problem of many opportunistic startups leveraging current trends. Many startup pieces of advice I read seem to ignore the fact that you need money and contacts to have visibility in the right places (SV, elite university/circle).

While Paul Graham is a legend and I look forward to learning from his experiences, I believe that people in a position of privilege tend to overlook the advantages that come with their position.

For example, it is true that Steve Jobs started in a garage. However, both Apple founders were living in the epicenter of computing companies at the time. They both worked at HP and had contacts with people at Stanford. If you had built a personal computer in a garage in Latin America at that time, it would have been like a tree falling in the middle of nowhere.