Interesting article. The first comment (by "dg") is interesting, too:<p>> Yup. American visitors to Europe + UK often marvel at the efficient passenger railway system and wonder why the US can’t build something similar, without understanding the history of how they were built. In the 1800s early investors/inventors went through a railway mania, grossly overbuilt, and went bankrupt. The good lines were later scooped up for a fraction of their original cost by a 2nd round of investors, and morphed into today’s system. It was never economically feasible to build a passenger railway system without first wiping out the “too early” investors.<p>So while being too early pretty much guarantees failure, it seems we might need those early people. Perhaps the recipe for an truly innovative society necessarily includes over-encouragement of bleeding-edge innovator types. These will almost certainly fail; however, in failing, they allow later businesses to succeed.<p>Readers are invited to consider what role Y Combinator might play in this process. :-)