The founder-mythology canon — Thiel, Horowitz, Graham, the Steve Jobs bio. The wish is to be the founder who saw what the world couldn't see, paid the price, and was vindicated. The counterfeit excuses anything the founder does on the grounds that founders are exempt from normal rules, and reframes "the secret you have that others don't" as evidence of correctness rather than as a claim that needs to be tested.
Anchor works
Zero to One (Thiel/Masters — slot-proven, pure-counterfeit pole); Ries The Lean Startup (slot-proven, partial-refusal pole); Horowitz The Hard Thing About Hard Things; Isaacson Jobs bio; Hoffman/Yeh Blitzscaling; Paul Graham essays (heroic-founder strand); Blank Customer Development; Maurya Running Lean; the Lean-* franchise (methodology strand)
Catalog detail — status & engines ↓
Status
Both poles slot-proven on canonical text (Thiel 2014 + Ries 2011 dossiers; bistability test confirmed 2026-06-02); outside critique pending
Engines
apotheosis + mastery + impunity + order/legibility (four legs at pure-counterfeit pole — Thiel); apotheosis (at partial-refusal pole) + mastery + order/legibility (three legs at partial-refusal pole — Ries; impunity-leg structurally absent)