That is indeed an interesting idea. Cos I agree, I usually value the extra claim much more than going first, there are a few exceptions for it. And sometimes I feel like (especially in CEO games) that going first is rather punishing.

However the time scales have to impactful, like if you found at 30 sec, then you have to wait for 5 minutes, when at 1 minute, then maybe only 2 minutes and at 1:30 you receive it right away. Gonna be hard to balance though.

I think that this may actually be an artifact of playing a lot of 6 player and 8 player games.

As the number of players (or, really, the size of the map) goes down, it becomes much more likely that any given game will be extremely constrained on at least one or two resources.  If there's only one cluster of iron or water or whatever, initial founding location becomes significantly more important, and it can easily become a race for the correct spot.

In similar vein, as the number of players drops, each player has more control over the overall market, and that makes it easier to punish people for founding in weaker positions by punishing them with high prices on essentials that they're not positioned to get themselves due to founding late.  The market is also just generally less volatile/swing-y as the number of players rise, which increases the value of individual claims.

So, basically, I'm not sure I agree that this is necessary to balance games out in general, but it may be worth considering with 6+ player games.

One interesting question that arises here, actually, is what the "intended" game size is.  The game can be generally balanced for a number of sizes, but presumably there's a sort of canonical point to balance things around.  StarCraft 2, for instance, is intentionally balanced around 2 player games, even though other sizes work.