My impression is these people are great learners and upgrade themselves to do what's required of them to grow the company - most importantly how to hire, empowe

My impression is these people are great learners and upgrade themselves to do what's required of them to grow the company - most importantly how to hire, empower and motivate talented people. We're (HNers I guess; assuming dev-focused mentality) bound to think it means reading the manual and cracking complex problems, but it's more towards prioritizing, figuring out who knows what and how to manage people. I'm not an investor so this is all anecdata from going through YC and having a close friend get to 100Ms in funding. My friend has obv hired an amazing exec team, but like thousands of things, he learned how to do it by reading, asking for advice and asking for help. Early stage he figured out how to get a 'technical cofounder' - literally got on the phone with 100 engineers (got me to screen like 3-5 to get a gist of what I was looking for). Of course, I was only just one source: for everything he had to figure out/study he got input from many sources. They learn, they figure out what's important enough for them to put their time/attention, they delegate to talented people. I guess the quote 'A players hire A players and B players hire C players' applies too. They can tell who's an A player by setting the bar high enough to their standard. I think there wont be a straight answer to this question - people who figure it out make huge companies and a lot of money as a reward for cracking this puzzle. Re:groupon then on top of that you have a couple of dice rolling and if your number doesn't hit you're out.