I'm sorry you're having a bad time, but you sound like you're caught up in a few delusions.
When someone gets coffee with a stranger they are "going out of their way to help". What more are you asking for in these conversations? Agreed, nobody's going to fund some random biz guy with no track record and "an idea" (my guess from your post, sorry if I'm wrong). Reading that as racism/elitism is counterproductive and most likely inaccurate.
Build something people want (get users) and the investor types you sound like you're pursuing will want to talk to you. Sure, a good resume can get you in the door, but the best resume isn't a list of stodgy institutions, it's a list of successful projects.
EDIT: FWIW, I agree that the deck is completely stacked against the poor. It is much easier to build something when you can borrow $20k from a rich uncle to live on for a while. It's much easier to talk to investor types if you're familiar with their world. But what I'm getting at above is that those things stop mattering the minute you've built a product people are using.
some random biz guy with no track record and "an idea"?
Now that's delusional. Clearly you wish that to be the case. It is not. SV is all about the gate-keepers, and they are all about profiling, which they call "signaling". If you don't fit into that mold, you are not going to receive a warm welcome; I don't care how good you are.
Read Peter Thiel's Stanford class CS183 notes. Peter explicitly says this, "It's like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It's not Stanford. You can [have] a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it's a hard negative signal to get past."
If you are a white male, in your early 20's and went to Stanford, go for it. If you're not, don't even try to play the game; it's rigged to use you, not help you.
When someone gets coffee with a stranger they are "going out of their way to help". What more are you asking for in these conversations? Agreed, nobody's going to fund some random biz guy with no track record and "an idea" (my guess from your post, sorry if I'm wrong). Reading that as racism/elitism is counterproductive and most likely inaccurate.
Build something people want (get users) and the investor types you sound like you're pursuing will want to talk to you. Sure, a good resume can get you in the door, but the best resume isn't a list of stodgy institutions, it's a list of successful projects.
EDIT: FWIW, I agree that the deck is completely stacked against the poor. It is much easier to build something when you can borrow $20k from a rich uncle to live on for a while. It's much easier to talk to investor types if you're familiar with their world. But what I'm getting at above is that those things stop mattering the minute you've built a product people are using.