Last night marked the much-feared premiere of Bravo's "Start-Ups: Silicon Alley"--a bikini clad-allegory about the startup world's penchant for self-aggrandizing that vacillates somewhere between a light-hearted brother-sister romcom and "True Life: I Have No Fucking Clue How to Pitch a VC." It's your standard Andy Cohen clubhouse fare with the life cycle of an early stage company as a plot device.

But it's hard for Betabeat, sitting pretty in New York City, to assess what, exactly, the show gets right and wrong about Valley culture. Is the primary mode of socialization really costume parties? Can you get humans to deliver room service to your dog just by saying "social media" three times? Thus we enlisted a native Spencer Chen to separate the real from the fake, borrowing from the recap format pioneered by chroniclers of that other cinéma véritée classic, "Gossip Girl."

"YOLO." Drink!

Last night my girlfriend and I hosted a viewing party for the premiere of Bravo’s latest reality show, "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley." (Yes, startups is spelled with a hyphen and mixed caps and that alone should have been a signal of things to come). It’s definitely one of the more polarizing things to hit the Valley recently because this time, it’s personal. Danny Trinh, a well-known product designer for Path, captured the general sentiment:

Now I know what the residents of Jersey Shore must feel like.

— Danny Trinh (@dtrinh) October 9, 2012

Most people in the Valley are very proud to be part of a thriving ecosystem that they helped nurture and build, hence the unease about being misrepresented in mass media. So we thought we'd invite 30 of our startup friends to our house in the Lower Haight to rubberneck the disaster.

Valley get-togethers are known for their high-flake factor. You’re lucky to get 50% of the people that say they’re going to show up to actually show up. This was not the case last night . . . everyone wanted to see what happens when our industry hit the spotlight. We had a nice cross-section in attendance--from senior staffers at TechCrunch, AllThingsD, Bloomberg, CNET to founders of well-known startups to VCs to early employees of companies such as Box, Foursquare, and Twitter, as well as your humble hosts: my girlfriend heads up marketing for Boston-based VC firm Highland Capital partners and I head up business development for a well-funded mobile enterprise startup, Appcelerator.

Suffice to say, not much was going to get past this crowd. So, how did the show do in eyes of the Valley?

Recap: The first episode was merely the setup introducing the cast members with clichéd proclamations like, “It’s a gold rush," "The Valley is where dreams come true”, “You only live once!” (YOLO: drink.) There’s a number of unintended comical moments, mostly when Sarah Austin is moving her lips, but the premiere ends on a high note with a cameo from the always entertaining and very frank venture capitalist Dave McClure.

How Real? Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, start with a perfect score of 100% real and go from there!

Street Cred -20%

If you’re looking for established Valley personalities or any deep insiders, there’s none among the cast. I’m not just talking about personal cachet or individual fame, but actual projects or associations that actual Valley folks can identify with. The startup scene around here is highly integrated and relatively small . . . we’re all a couple connections removed from most folks, with the exception of these cast members.

Morgan Missen, a former top recruiter for Foursquare and Twitter, had the line of the night: “I escorted Hermione Way out of a party once and other than that I haven’t heard of any of these guys.”

Let the games begin.

Sarah Austin -30%

Okay, seriously, what the fuck? If there is one cast member that’s clearly here to fan the flames, it’s Sarah Austin. She's the one every Valley person was afraid would be mistaken for the real thing, but looks to be a pure Hollywood creation, despite being born and raised in the Bay Area. She’s a “Lifecaster”, whatever that is (read: not a real startup job). She’s constantly spray tanning and it takes her fours hours to get ready for a launch party. It was very interesting that the Four Seasons in Palo Alto lets her stay there for free in exchange for her social media promotion. Must be those $10,000 tweets of hers. Sarah makes tech PR chicks around here look like the next Marissa Mayer. If you haven’t figured it out by now, nothing about her life actually happens in the Valley.

The Toga Party -15%

NO. Just no. Have you ever seen startup guys? They’re pasty as hell and the last thing they like to do is dress up as Roman Gladiators from the Castro. I’ve been invited to all of one costume party all year in the Valley. Maybe. Also, if the Valley were ever going to dress up, the folks here are way too dialed-in to pop culture to do something as hackneyed as a college toga party. See TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler who shaved his head to be Walter White from "Breaking Bad." So badass. So Valley.

Dwight Crow and David Murray +10%

Based on the teasers, Dwight Crow definitely was the guy you wanted to hate coming into the show, but our group was starting to have a soft spot for him. Firstly, he actually looks like a developer. He also has the prototypical co-founder in the Valley, i.e. someone that actually looks Asian (or at least part Asian, we’ll take what we can get from this show). Also, a solid whiteboard session is what separates the real Valley folks from the fakers and you just can’t fake a good whiteboard sesh. Dwight seems to have decent skills there and even the content on the whiteboards looked technically legit. We’ll throw David Murray into the mix here too as a positive for the show; he was also filmed with actual developer tools on his screen rather than having a Facebook page up the entire time like the cast member in the ad sales industry, Kim Taylor.

Dave McClure +15%

Yup, that’s pretty legit there. Bravo stayed true to one of the real personalities in the VC community with the investor and founder of 500 Startups. The producer are self-aware enough to zoom in on Dave’s reaction to Hermione and Ben’s pitch. His WTF look that followed this nonsensical pitch was priceless: “So our product will enable people to see their life expectancy in real life.” Huh? However, the Valley is full of far out ideas that sound dumb when you say them out loud, so this is pretty true to life.

Tallying it up, we get a final score of 60% real Silicon Valley for Episode 1. Not bad considering the rending of garments that preceded the premiere. But ultimately, we all walked away feeling let down. It was disappointing to realize the show was, well, really boring as far as televised drama. But we haven't given up yet. Hell, we have at least 5 more of episodes to see if Sarah Austin is going to completely implode. Stay tuned  . . .

Spencer Chen is head of partnerships at @appcelerator (and Betabeat's 86th most entertaining Tech Twitterer!) Follow him @SpencerChen.

Ms. Kunst

Minority Report is a guest column by Sarah Kunst, who does business development and product at fashion app Kaleidoscope. She’s a black, non-engineer female in tech, but plans to IPO anyway.

Few founder origin stories capture the nerd mind like "Hacker as dropout." From Bill Gates at Microsoft to Box's Adam Levie, and of course a little-known CEO named Zuck, the allure of leaving the dorm room behind to rake in billions seems irresistible.

Recently, this middle finger to the establishment of higher education has been codified by billionaire rabble rouser Peter Thiel. This past Sunday, for the second time in three months, the New York Times found cause for a close examination of the virtues of Mr. Thiel's 20 under 20 Fellowship as a way for exceptional teenagers to pass college and collect $100,000 to spend on changing the world. Granted, participants aren't your typical undeclared freshmen at State College U. Rather, they've already exhibited Mensa-level intelligence, with a work ethic to match.

What doesn't coordinate quite as well? Their social lives. A recent night saw several Thiel fellows--all under legal drinking age--at a San Francisco house party described by one attendee as "tech hippies doing drugs and sitting in a cuddle pile."

It was an unsettling sight for guests surprised by the Summer of Love manifesting itself in 2012, but for the babes in the Redwoods it seemed disturbing on another level. A Thiel fellow who dropped out of an Ivy League college at age 17 spent most of her brief time at the party hugging her purse and asking for clarification about what, exactly, a whippet was.

Perhaps most telling, even those who've won the GED lottery don't believe it's a one-size-fits-all solution. In a recent interview, Mr. Levie, the Box CEO who dropped out of USC, told Business Insider, "Unfortunately this is going to produce a lot of people that are college drop outs that don't actually have the idea that's taking off that they can go spend time on. It's not the right sequence." Leaving school to become a billionaire seems logical, ending up sans degree or hockey stick company while former classmates field offers from hot tech, banking and graduate programs sounds less practical.

Tipping our hat to Malcolm Gladwell, we can acknowledge that most truly great engineers were coding long before their first CS course in college. But many other skills integral to growing a company are learned in and out of the classroom in ways the "real world" can't always match. Morgan Missen, who attended my alma mater Michigan State University (as did Texts From Last Night founder Lauren Leto), credits her illustrious recruiting career, which has included stints at Google, Twitter and Foursquare, to her collegiate role as recruitment chair of the Sigma Kappa sorority. "It was highly strategic and strictly choreographed. I realized then how the people you pick affect the success of every organization," Ms. Missen told an interview earlier this year.

Visiting Google, Facebook, or even Conde Nast--the similarities between work campus and college campus can't be overlooked: Cafeteria as social minefield, new recruits wearing special clothing to signal their n00b status, recreational sports leagues and gossip running amok. Assuming these cultures are so prevalent because employees enjoy them, how do people whose last experience in a classroom involved a hall monitor create a corporate culture that approximates the light oversight and high expectations of a college campus?

UPenn has become a bastion for fraternity men turned successful startup founders. Bonobos got their start there out of Andy Dunn's trunk. Adam Rich and Ben Lerer's bromance started on campus and turned into Thrillist. Cy Massoumi went there before a banking career that lead to Zocdoc. Indeed, investor about town David Tisch is one of the many former UPenn frat boys redefining Silicon Alley.

Harvard Business School has a similar pedigree among ladies. Alexa Von Tobel from Learnvest, Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky of Baublebar, Go Try It On's Marissa Evans and Birchbox's Katia Beauchamp all overlapped. Birchbox is even paying it forward with an informal co-working space for HBS students in their cavernous Murray Hill offices. The shared experiences and ups and downs of these confederacies give the alums shoulders to cry on and investor referrals that just don't come from coding alone in your parents' basement.

Skipping the formative years of college might give kids an accolade advantage, but at what cost to their social lives and networks? Are they really better off on their own with enough money to pay the bills for a couple years than they would be in R&D labs at schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT and University of Michigan? Those six schools, which boasted a combined endowment of $102 billion in 2011, supply brilliant minds with world class facilities and faculty, flexibility to pursue research and degrees of their choosing. As Harvard proved with Facebook, they also will do little to interfere with profits or process should a runaway success emerge out of the dining halls and dorm rooms. Additionally, students have an alumni network, clean and affordable housing, ready access to regular meals and a safe place to spend the years between having a curfew and polishing up your public speaking for an IPO road show.

Where would Instagram be without the contacts Kevin Systrom forged at the Stanford frat Sigma Nu, where he first met Mark Zuckerberg and Adam D'Angelo? Or even Facebook without the early adopters on college campuses who were ready to sign up and tell their friends as soon as the social network arrived. Without an early job serving as campus marketing manager for Apple and working for valley mainstays like Path's Dave Morin would my personal and professional interest in technology have blossomed? Outliers always have and will forge their own paths in education and life, but for many, the network effects of college are worth checking in to.

Ms. Loh (LinkedIn)

Poaching for tech talent has reached such a crescendo in New York that, in some cases, proper etiquette is being thrown out the window. As Business Insider discovered with a few LinkedIn searches this morning, there seems to be a some kind of secret tunnel between Googleplex East and Foursquare. According to LinkedIn, 18 of Foursquare's 67-staffers hail from from Google.

Filching from the behemoths is fair game, of course, and restricted stock units and salaries at Google has risen to try to stop the tide. But that figure might be low-balling it. "A source close to the company said around a third of the company's employees have experienced some time at Google," reports BI.

That might have a little something to do with a trend Betabeat noticed last year.

Not only were Googlers getting poached, but Silicon Alley startups were also poaching Google recruiters. Last September, for example, Foursquare hired Susan Loh, a former lead technical recruiter at Google, away from Yelp to lead its efforts in New York. Then there's Morgan Missen, Foursquare's powerhouse recruiter out in San Francisco, who hails from both Twitter and Google. In June, Tumblr stole Sean McDermott away from Google's Chelsea outpost to help the startup increase its engineering staff. According to LinkedIn, there are at least four Tumblr employees who spent time at the GOOG, though we expect that number to rise.

He who poaches the poachers laughs last?