Y-Combinator founders are selected on fundraising ability:

Y Combinator is a spray venture capital firm. I have spent more hours than I honestly care to admit analyzing YC patterns and investment trends, looking at what they invest in. Increasingly, it is exactly one thing, which is pedigree and charisma. The reason in all of these dropouts is because to have the confidence to believe in yourself to drop out of a top university, you have to be a pretty charismatic, pretty incredible human. They don't need 100 investments of their 100 investments to succeed. They need one out of each 10. That means 9 out of them can fail. There's often a probability bias and that when you look at it from the outside, you say, well, these are horrible investments. Why would you invest in something that is a bunch of freshmen in college dropping out? But let's be real, Facebook was a freshman in college dropping out. Microsoft, Apple, it's all these same profiles and that's the founder profile they're selecting for. It makes sense if you're writing 100 of those checks and if you can stand to write 100 of those checks, but if you have a more concentrated portfolio construction approach, you should not be doing that, which is why I don't really invest in any YC back companies. This is the same reason you've seen YC draw back from emerging markets. They're investing less in Latin America, less in Southeast Asia because they want these US-based personas that will raise a lot of money. They'll mark up their businesses, they'll be able to sell on secondary in many cases for profit. Do I have a lot of respect for that model? Absolutely not. But do I think it works? 100% it does.