Let's say you are a founder at a small startup. You are looking for the best talent. Rarely do you have thousands of people knocking at your door asking for a position. You have to go out and look for the best people. You will find yourself in one of three positions:
A) Not finding enough people -- then you have the ability to interview everyone, and any candidate may have a chance of getting in the door.
B) Finding too many people -- then you don't have the bandwidth to interview everyone, and you need some sort of heuristic to decide who to interview first. This is where pedigree comes in.
C) Outsourcing to a third party recruiting firm -- generally, even if you instruct them not to, they will send you candidates with strong pedigrees
There are ways of distinguishing yourself and building pedigree without spending the first years of your career at megacorp. Education, side projects, introductions, etc. If you can't create one of these distinguishing factors for yourself, you probably don't belong at a startup anyway.
In general, I think the issues of "Where should I work?" and "How do I get noticed/hired?" are very separate issues.
Let's say you are a founder at a small startup. You are looking for the best talent. Rarely do you have thousands of people knocking at your door asking for a position. You have to go out and look for the best people. You will find yourself in one of three positions:
A) Not finding enough people -- then you have the ability to interview everyone, and any candidate may have a chance of getting in the door.
B) Finding too many people -- then you don't have the bandwidth to interview everyone, and you need some sort of heuristic to decide who to interview first. This is where pedigree comes in.
C) Outsourcing to a third party recruiting firm -- generally, even if you instruct them not to, they will send you candidates with strong pedigrees