As rare as good founders are to find, i'd argue that it's even rarer to find founder founders like PG & Jessica.
Not to say that people like PG & Jessica are so rare that it couldnt happen via an institution, (i'd ague that most of the yc alumni could become founder founders), but the circumstances to become a PG & Jessica require a rare blend of both personal character development beyond just authenticity and a perfect alignment of opportunity to make for such an incubator.
As soon as the process of an art form is institutionalized, one of the first things to go tend to be authenticity to the form of process and policy. It isn't that there is anything inherently wrong with institutionalizing something, but that authenticity and relationship development inherently do not scale, and the simplest way to make it scale is to exchange relationships for process & policy.
Many day to day decisions could be made into an algorithm optimizing for the greater good, yet opportunities would be lost to scenarios akin to that of the scene in iRobot where the robot saves the adult man instead of the young girl from drowning because the robot calculated that the man had a higher chance of survival. decisions like these are where character is paramount.
Not to say that people like PG & Jessica are so rare that it couldnt happen via an institution, (i'd ague that most of the yc alumni could become founder founders), but the circumstances to become a PG & Jessica require a rare blend of both personal character development beyond just authenticity and a perfect alignment of opportunity to make for such an incubator.
As soon as the process of an art form is institutionalized, one of the first things to go tend to be authenticity to the form of process and policy. It isn't that there is anything inherently wrong with institutionalizing something, but that authenticity and relationship development inherently do not scale, and the simplest way to make it scale is to exchange relationships for process & policy.
Many day to day decisions could be made into an algorithm optimizing for the greater good, yet opportunities would be lost to scenarios akin to that of the scene in iRobot where the robot saves the adult man instead of the young girl from drowning because the robot calculated that the man had a higher chance of survival. decisions like these are where character is paramount.