I had no time to write a full-fledged comment but people here took offense. Shrugs. I meant that the existential risk for founders is that of looking or being scummy. The precise, non-offensive definition of the sense of "scummy" that I intended, which unfortunately does not rhyme with "crazy", is, "profit from information asymmetry". Newton did not clearly "profit" --- though I had almost taken the 3 bets to mean the ones he placed on the South Sea --- even though he had a massive edge. (Pretty much people are arguing about scale here, in my opinion.) I do think PG wants a modern edge over Newton's methods, which concretely means pumping the applied intuitions/phronesis of the SV intellectual elite using software value capture or the VC network. By the way YC do employ heavy-duty "scum filters", e.g. the women interviewers. This is all consistent to the point of being trivial.