In the early 2010s, many incubators tried to spark startups by offering coworking spaces, yet no clear success stories emerged. Sam Altman, then president of Y Combinator, argued that a lack of shared spaces keeps fragile great ideas alive; a coworking environment can make founders self‑delude, turning promising concepts into safe, trivial ones. Creativity, he notes, needs a *state of mind* where external opinions are irrelevant.

Artists echo this view: Pablo Picasso wrote that solitude is essential for serious work, and James Baldwin saw the artist’s duty as cultivating isolation. But solitude is not loneliness; it’s a mental space free from judgment.

A vivid example comes from mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. In the 1980s he recorded 29 months of his thinking in *Récoltes et Semailles*, a manuscript exceeding 2000 pages. His notes trace how early, private encounters with intuition gave him the edge over peers who followed established paths.

These stories illustrate that the birth of ideas often depends on quiet, introspective work rather than noisy collaboration.