Wannabe-founder dogma is that most of the "low hanging fruit" of innovation has already been picked. What they really mean is that they look around at the products they use and see things that are easily made with modern tools, but that’s like looking at the pyramids of Giza from the cab of a construction crane. Almost all human innovations look like low hanging fruit in hindsight: history’s greatest scientific discoveries were made by jumping in bathtubs and sitting under apple trees.

There are exceptions of course. Few would suggest that putting humans on the moon was a trivial undertaking, but the emergence of private space programs with stellar ambition highlights how our tools guide our measures of ease and possibility. The thousands of engineers who designed the Saturn V with drafting pens celebrated when it took flight, while the dozens glued to screens at SpaceX are disappointed when their rockets don’t land themselves too.

It’s not that people today are smarter or work harder, but they have bigger levers in the form of better tools, multiplied by generations of institutional knowledge. Teenage programmers who clone Facebook or Twitter as a side project are right to say that it’s easy, but may not realize that’s only true because those companies built the tools they use to do so.

So if what we call “low hanging fruit” is only ever a mirage in our hindsight, the search space for new ideas must be expanding. That means new technologies are enabling new forms of innovation every day, even if those of the recent past are getting easier to replicate, and therefore more competitive¹. And if every day brings new possibilities, it should bring new ventures to pursue them. But practically speaking, are more people empowered to start companies today because they have new frontiers to explore, or because they see others doing the same? If valuable new ideas are rare discoveries, only those standing at the edge of impossibility can see the next step. If the direction of the future is a collective decision on the other hand, it's determined by applause alone.

Many founders today seem to have a cargo cult belief that emulating the look and feel of other successful companies will lead to their own success, from their market, to their management practices, to their choice of grey t-shirt or black turtleneck. That doesn't mean that ambitious people shouldn't gather in common spaces or discuss their visions for the future. Cooperation and commiseration are productive, but it seems hard to form original ideas when you're focused on what everyone else is doing.

My quiet belief is that starting a company is an act of arrogance. It's telling the world that you know a secret about the future that they don't; that you're capable of creating something they aren’t, and succeeding where most fail. From the outside, starting a company has always seemed risky, especially to established onlookers. From the inside, the stakes have never seemed lower. Seed capital is more available than ever², and low startup costs cheapen failures in the eyes of investors.

Once funded, time spent working in an incubator is hardly a risk. Trendy office spaces are pleasant settings, and anyone announcing over dinner that their startup has been admitted to an incubator will be met with envy rather than skepticism. Even the opportunity cost of leaving a stable career has been mitigated: many prospective entrepreneurs already have the freedom of working from home, allowing them to spend their unproductive hours on a new idea. Employment clauses that once claimed ownership of all new inventions are now limited to those created during working hours using company resources. When a prospective founder does leave their job to work on something new, trying and failing is likely to be a positive influence on their resumé rather than the sabbatical they may have left in the past. Incubators facilitate arm's length funding, enabling founders – who aren’t beholden to preserving their savings, or the trust of family and friends – to pursue startups for the sake of participating in the market of the moment.

This combination enables more riskless entrepreneurship than ever before – surely a good thing, as it opens the doors of innovation to people who may not have had the resources to pursue it in the past – but it also means that founders have less to lose than ever before, which amplifies the noise of value seekers around the signal of value creators. While this accessibility is valuable to all, I wonder if it reduces the cost of opportunism from credibility to probability, reducing the value creation necessary to make venture bets attractive.

If there’s one thing I do really well, it’s being completely divided in my beliefs. On the one hand, the very real phenomenon of founders chasing the fundable flavour of the month hampers innovation, by making it difficult to separate value creators from valuation chasers. On the other hand, recognizing this phenomenon alone should make it easier to keep the lights on by aligning with the prevailing winds when my own payroll is at stake. I believe that participation trophies in this industry are a fallacy: anyone whose ambition ends with a quick sale alone is unlikely to persevere long enough to capture it. But greater fools prolong their fate, heighten their ambitions, and impair the original objective of building the future. Startups are more fashionable than ever before, and the polite assurances extended to them may do more harm than good. Choose your outfit wisely.