It depends on social pressure. For places like Silicon valley, the ultimate status symbol is being a founder, which inherently involves inventing (what a founder would call) important stuff. It's similar in Israel. Heck, there, startups are struggling to scale becuase everyone wants to be a founder.
I don't agree that founders are unique in inventing "important stuff".
In reality, most important inventions, are efforts of large groups of people(that may be distributed across organizations), and most of it is work - not coming up with a "great" "vision".
