Is Silicon Valley A Meritocracy?

Marketplace looks at how it is and isn't:

Michael Arrington, angel investor and founder of the website Tech Crunch told CNN a few years ago that in Silicon Valley “generally speaking, it doesn't matter what your education is. It doesn't matter who your parents are here.  You can become very successful based purely on your brain size and how you use it.”
A favorite example of the anyone-can-make-it-here narrative is the story of Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal. Lacy knows his origin story by heart.
“Moved from the Soviet Union when he was 16,” she’ll tell you.  “His family had $300 in their pocket and he had to learn English by watching an old television set that he pulled out of a dumpster and repaired. Ten years later or so, he sold a company for $1.5 billion. Ask someone like Max Levchin ‘do you consider this place a meritocracy?’”
So I did.
But first, I wanted to make sure the story that gets told about him was right.
“Yeah, that's remarkably accurate,” Levchin said after I repeated the biography Lacy had told me. “The only thing I'm not sure is precise is the amount of dollars we had in our pocket. It might have been $200 or $400, I can't quite remember,” he laughed.  “But everything else is pretty much correct, including the TV story.”
Then I cut to the chase. Does he think Silicon Valley is a meritocracy?
First, he cautioned that it was hard for him to compare it to anything else, since it’s the only place he’s ever really worked. That said, “on the absolute scale, it seems quite meritocratic,” he told me.  “I've met lots of people that have succeeded independent of their humble or otherwise origins.”
But Levchin also cautioned there are certain details of his story that often get left out. “I was very lucky,” he said.
Luck came in many forms. Even though his parents couldn't afford a TV, they did scrape up enough money to buy him a computer.
“My family was very supportive of the idea that having access to a personal computer would do something good for me, and within a few weeks of landing in the U.S., they gave me a PC to work on, to play with and to explore,” he told me.
And the importance Levchin’s family gave to computer access was no accident.  His mother had been a computer programmer in the Ukraine. His father, grandfather and grandmother were physicists -- prominent ones.
In fact, if you go down the often-cited list of big tech companies with immigrant founder success stories -- PayPal, Intel, eBay, YouTube -- you'll find many of those immigrant founders had a parent who was a scientist or academic.

Just like in the rest of the country, a lot of your access to opportunity in Silicon Valley comes down to who you parents were and what they did.  I think Silicon Valley gets that rep partly because it is a place where nerds succeed, and they don't see as many not-so-smart but better looking people moving up ahead of them.  Plus, the Internet revolution has made them fantastically rich, and they have to find some way to justify it as more than just luck and mass markets at work. 

There's a lot of fascinating technology out there, but look at the list above.  Of those, only Intel actually makes anything.  PayPal is a site which allows people to make credit card transactions securely.  eBay is an online flea market/junk auction.  YouTube found a way to compress a gazillion videos that might have been recorded on VHS and sent in to America's (not really) Funniest Home Videos.  Other than the chipmaker, how much richer are our lives thanks to these inventions.  How about Twitter or this blog?  Is it really a good idea for me to text out whatever I'm thinking to the world?  And a lot of the web guys have gotten rich by being able to mine data and sell it to the barbarian marketers.  While it is good entertainment, a lot of Silicon Valley is just Hollywood run by geeks.