The issue is that some people can spend just enough hours to make it LOOK like they really understand enough, when in practice, they have wide breadth, but not

The issue is that some people can spend just enough hours to make it LOOK like they really understand enough, when in practice, they have wide breadth, but not anywhere enough depth to do the job well. When the startup becomes mid size, suddenly you have a spaghetti codebase with unfortunate tradeoffs, a wide infrastructure full of hard coding that badly attempts to mimic the state of the art of 5 years ago, and one nine of reliability. All of this is of course undocumented, so when you bring in new people, they take forever to learn the existing system, as nothing resembles good practices. As those new people try to clean everything up, they look far less productive than those people that have made this gigantic mess in the first place, and then everyone wonders how they got so lucky with their early, uberproductive employees, which seem to be so much better than anyone else. If the startup has a good economic situation, they might survive while compounding the problem by overhiring (I am sure you all have heard the stories). If the finances aren't quite as good, then the startup folds. I see roads out of this, but they all pass by different early employee compensation: A good early employee is not a good employee in a midsized company, but stock options don't work all that well when early engineers should be leaving the company 3 years in, before exercising the options makes any sense.