Founding vs Inheriting
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But something important has been silently lost, which is the founder’s ability to invent the institution from scratch — or reinvent it in the face of a crisis, like COVID-19. We can also think of this as read-only culture, the ability to repeat what an ancestor has handed down — but not recreate it from first principles.
- Just about every Western institution run by a political heir failed, because it was presented with the unanticipated shock of COVID-19.
- Where heirs failed, founders succeeded.
- These people had the intellectual horsepower to compete with the best of the East. Yet they chose to found something rather than inherit it. And that’s how tech became a cultural fork of the East Coast.