I get the sense from this article that every startup can be reduced to a lot of engineers chained to benches with a founder (or cofounders) standing gloriously in the limelight, cracking the whip between press interviews and investor meetings at the Battery.

One thought is that the founding team at a startup is likely to be entrepreneurial and initiative-taking enough to seek out these opportunities for themselves, should they want them; though I appreciate the nod to startups who remain in 'stealth' mode indefinitely, leaving a puzzling blur on someone's resume.

Another, that I definitely see folks out and about from startups who are not the founding team, but then I go to technical events and read technical publications, neither of which tend to fawn over the CEO to the exclusion of all else. Should we glorify the Rails developer who built a CRUD app over the CEO who found the money to pay the team, test the app in the market, and ultimately grow the business? No, we should reward ingenuity regardless of the title of the person behind it. But HN does a pretty good job of that, and at its core I think this article is just an argument against shallow tech journalists who prefer a tidy story about college roommates over a messy bunch of talented folks who did great work.