I’m writing on the 1 train and it’s the 96th station. I just left Columbia University for a 1:1 counseling session. The update for you is that I’m considering going back to school. Not seriously, but it’s something I owe my immigrant parents to just think about before I hit 25-years-old.

Lately, I’ve become absolutely obsessed with this term that startups, especially investors, use: pedigree.

This might be a generally shunned on term - considered old fashioned, definitely. Still, in my first two years in the industry, it was one casually landed in the applied instance. Meaning one wouldn’t bring it up if someone wasn’t pedigreed; but if they had it…

As you know, I left school on my fourth year, out of five. As much as I feel like I could have, I didn’t receive that platinum steel degree to put up in my parents house. It’s something I considered almost cool for almost a year. That changed when I became close with a friend with the same background as mine, who had fallen in love with a man with what one would consider genuine pedigree. We would meet up every few weeks and I’d get the download of exactly what had gone wrong.

She called this the “pebbles” in their relationship. They’d have a great time, enjoying each others company, and then someone would bring up (insert: work, jobs, interests, etc.) and there would be a little shake on the way; either at that moment or the moments alone with this guy after.

As much as the term “pedigree” in a professional context is probably inappropriate considering there as less controversial ways to put it (and that can be a known goal of most professional settings,) I’ll give it two seconds of validity in that in the definition as being: unaligned interests and unaligned experiences.

In the context of startups, and specifically venture capital, “pedigree” is used to define high-status validators to justify founder alignment. Depending on who’s saying it, this can mean blanket societal validators or something more specific than that.

Granted, this is a toxic thing to write about. And, I put myself at risk of potentially scaring anyone where looking for hope that “pedigree” is a topic that’s absolutely outdated, useless and stupid.

But, the reality is that it’s not.

“Pedigree”