[dnautics]

This could work.

I regularly see incubators (including yc, but the worst offenders are e.g. indie bio) pick ideas that are actually physically/scientifically/practically impossible, or socially difficult with no plan to solve it. And the proxy that is used to select them/reject other candidates is 'team'. PG even says that the most important criterion is team.

Of course, this is not necessarily a poor model for an incubator, as, if you're someone that can hoodwink an incubator into buying into snake oil with your personality, you're likely to be able to hoodwink the next round of investors, or better yet, all the way to an exit. Greater fools theory and all that.

I wouldn't be surprised if those running incubators know this and therefore don't bother with more than cursory due diligence as the next round will assume early due diligence was done/"the correct pivot was/would've been chosen due to mentor input", due to the power of social validation. The incentives are not correctly aligned, anyway.

I wonder if this harebrained idea might actually have a shot at breaking the diligence problem.