[est31]

Which of the modern startup founders have gotten into the Stanford PhD program as teenagers? Those people are extremely rare and there is far too much VC floating around to focus only on such talent. Most founders, while still outstanding, are not from that class of person. Also, due to the larger sums of money being thrown around, people can just do those things now and spend their time growing their business instead of optimizing it. In the VC funded environment, optimizing businesses lose out to competitors which grow the fastest.