I think a lot of the value is taking the ordinary engineers (by hacker news) and letting them actually do something. Staying small helps this, because you are not thinking of the business ops burden of not building microservices. You’re building your single dockerized app.
To Meta, it might mean cream of the crop, $1m+ engineer. To early Google, it might mean Stanford grad with deep CS knowledge. To a no-name startup, it might mean someone who accepts the job who takes initiative and knows how to crank out ugly code quickly on AWS and makes good prioritization decisions.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but mediocracy usually works better in the long run.
You want one or two stars, chemistry among the whole team, and good fundamentals.
Good sports examples: the LA Dodgers, 90s Chicago Bulls (a few stars, a few normal players, good fundamentals, and great chemistry)
Bad sports examples: the 2023 Mets with Verlander and Scherzer (both overpaid divas with bad attitudes that hated each other), the current Yankees (a few stars, no fundamentals or discipline)
If anything, the Blue Jays are the example, not the Dodgers.
The previous Dodgers were stacked, but I meant that they had good chemistry and fundamentals. They beat the Yankees because the Yankees just made too many mistakes.
The Mets hired highly paid stars but couldn’t find chemistry, as nobody could get along. They did have some good eras with DeGrom, Syndegaard, etc, but if I remember, many of those stars started out small and grew into their stardom with the team.
For startups it's best to start with at least one or two good technical co-founders, as the risk of losing them is lower when compared to an employee.