> The companies where we were like ”woah, these folks are smart as hell” for the most part failed

Being clever, for the most part, almost never buys you anything. Building a cool product has nothing to do with being particularly smart, and scaling said product also rarely has much to do with being some kind of genius.

There's this pervasive Silicon Valley throughline of the mythical "10x engineer," mostly repeated by incompetent CEO/PM-types which haven't written a line of code in their lives. In reality, having a solid mission, knowing who your customer is, finding that perfect product market fit, and building something people love is really what building stuff is all about.

At the end of the day, all the bit-wrangling in the world is in service of that goal.