The continue the bonsai metaphor: would its inevitable demise tell us about how hierarchies can be uprooted? Or conversely, that existing hierarchies that are well tended to rarely meet their end?
And that's why I say power must always come from the bottom.
Many people have anti-social traits which manifest by seeking power and then using it to extract value from other people at their expense.
Meanwhile the people doing real work are almost always pro-social but are too busy to play these power games, unless the power imbalance gets too large.
Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact
this is easily shown to not be true? from 2025 numbers I think:
University of California, Berkeley - 26 founders
Stanford University - 21
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 17
Cornell University - 10
Georgia Institute of Technology - 7
Carnegie Mellon University - 7
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 7
Harvard University - 6
University of Oxford - 6
University of Cambridge - 6
University of Pennsylvania - 5
University of Washington - 5
Columbia University - 5
Johns Hopkins - 4
Yale - 4
Caltech - 4
UCLA - 4
YC is, last I heard, largely an in-person thing. And it makes sense for CA schools to be highly represented because of that.
Doesn't that list consist entirely of the top of the top world universities, with small-ish admittance numbers and sky-high tuition price per year? I think you are kind of proving the point of the top commenter :)