This is true except for the "clever and lazy" part. In reality this should be "intelligent but with no skills, let more accomplished people do the work but take the credit".
'Taking the easy' path is not 'clever', it's just a good habit, and there's no reason that this person cannot be hard working as well.
Smart and diligent will get you a push button every day instead of one every week.
There is no substitute for fairly hard work in most startup environments. There are so many details, so many little things to consider, so much to be done that cannot be replaced with a button.
It relates well to my experience.
At a hosting company I worked for, many of the system admins and developers were promoted from within technical support.
Technical support had one very awesome feature I only ever saw at this company -- you had a quota of how many tickets you should complete in a given day. If you completed that number, you could leave and were paid for the full day. If you had 80 tickets to complete and did them in 2 hours, you left. If you had 80 tickets and couldn't complete them, you left after working for 8 hours. You could work from home every other day if you were hitting your quota, and work from home increased your quota by like 10 tickets. Quota numbers were based on some average of your tickets over the last 8 weeks, and for most people were somewhere around 70-100.
Categorically, each and every person who was promoted out of tech support had written scripts to fix common issues that were happening and frequently only worked a couple of hours a day while they were in technical support; other times would spend a lot of extra time working out programs to automate their jobs. Looking back at it, I think each of us thought we were getting away with something, but it was noticed and encouraged.
> Someone has a job that makes them push a button every 5 minutes. They write a script so they never have to push a butten again. That person is clever and lazy. That is who you want.
I believe my story very strongly correlates with the spirt of GP's explanation; if you do not see the similarities I'm not sure I could explain further.
If you do see the similarities and simply disagree with the word 'lazy,' then I should make my assumptions of the word more clear. In GP's context I've assumed the definition by Larry Wall from the Three Virtues[1]:
> Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure
Most lazy people I know will stick to manual action rather than take the time to script it out, mostly due to that initial overhead or having to potentially iterate on the logic due to future unknowns.
Grit (determination, resilience hard work) is often indicated as the #1 predictor of success - not IQ, and I agree with this.
Unless what you're doing is very new, or super sophisticated in which case brilliance is really a key ingredient, give me 'smart, gets along, works hard and accomplishes things' any day over 'brilliant and lazy'.
Biggest reward for the lowest cost.
It is a quote from a psychopath who tells other people "take that hill" and then lights up a cigar in the officer's club and brags how brave and smart he was.