In my experience I've found little correlation between pedigree and quality. This isn't a randomized study, but my experience for 30 years working for and founding (sometimes random) startups. The school one goes to and the companies one has on their resume do not mark a great employee or founder. Talent or ability and willingness to work hard and take responsibility are important.

At the same time, there are a lot of companies that fail into success-- where the market is right and the funding is sufficient that they can make mistake after mistake and still end up being successful.

So I think the part of the abstract that claims that this is "rational" to fund based on pedigree is confusing correlation for causation-- if people with pedigree but no ability tend to get a lot more funding than people with the same lack of ability but no pedigree, obviously more of them are going to be more successful. And the people with ability whether they have pedigree or not, may be more successful overall, but this study isn't controlling for that. (and it's hard to identify ability, that's for sure.)