In start-up lore, no figure is more venerated than the tech-world founder. No mere entrepreneur, the founder is unique, sitting above the categories other people might use to order the society around them. In fact, the personage is cast as a sort of revolutionary, proposing big solutions to questions nobody else is even thinking to ask — less often because the questions are too complicated or obscure than because they’re too  obvious , too expansive.

Read The New York Times Magazine article by John Herrmann here.