Imagine a tech company so visionary that it can take an idea public. A “concept IPO,” they called it. Picture the three founders, all former Apple employees, two of whom—software engineers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson—were already Silicon Valley legends for their work creating the Apple Macintosh. Atkinson’s prolific inventions included the double click and the drop‑down menu. The third founder, Marc Porat, had a gift for seeing the future. For his PhD dissertation at Stanford in 1976, Porat analyzed (in painstaking detail) a century of transition in the American labor force and predicted a sea change in work. An economy based primarily on transforming matter and energy—via agriculture and industry—had been giving way to one based on transforming information. Computers and telecommunications, he saw, were reshaping every industry. “We are entering another phase in economic history,” Porat wrote.…