First of all, the distinction in the title kind of seems like nonsense. You should focus on hiring talent. If you forget about talent, you might end up with cra

First of all, the distinction in the title kind of seems like nonsense. You should focus on hiring talent. If you forget about talent, you might end up with crappy engineers. If you forget about hiring, you may not end up with any engineers. More importantly, the author's goals are pretty unrealistic as a strategy to be applied wholesale to all companies hiring engineering talent, or even just startups hiring engineering talent. From my understanding, the author posits that when seeking an engineer, you need to find someone that 1) is good enough to start (read: co-found) a company with you; 2) knock the socks off the company in 90 days (read: in 3 months, you need to be talented enough to contribute in a way that significantly changes or improves the company); and 3) someone who is "destined" to succeed in big ways (i.e. start a new company that's changing the industry). The sum of all this seems to be that the author is suggesting that the way to build a great team is to find and only hire those engineers that are in the top 1% or 0.5% of the field. I'm sure that's a fantastic way to build a team, but it's not at all realistic, especially as a wholesale strategy. These people are hard to find; there are only so many of them. A startup is probably lucky if they can find one. It's pretty unreasonable to expect any company to build a team of exclusively these kind of engineers. It's a nice suggestion, but until we figure out how to come up with these amazing engineers, it doesn't solve anyone's problem of building a great team.