Being a founder used to carry with it the implication that you had seen something others hadn’t, that you were willing to be wrong in public about an unlikely future you believed in, and take a risk of banging your head against a wall with high career risk for a long time. Now it is almost eye-roll inducing in many non-tech circles as people... See more

Aesthetic warmth, values coherence, institutional vibe. These are now functioning as primary signals for where elite talent goes (and more importantly, stays), and by extension, which companies breakaway and which don’t.