Definitely agree, however more for the case of someone looking to build a business. I constantly even have to remind myself that with the goal of building a bus

Definitely agree, however more for the case of someone looking to build a business. I constantly even have to remind myself that with the goal of building a business, writing code or learning new technologies is just not the best investment in time when so much progress can be made towards creating a business by shortcutting the technology upfront. In fact this is why I happen to disagree a bit with Paul Graham that being a "hacker" is such an essential trait to entrepreneurship. I think a hacker just represents intelligence, which is beneficial to building a business among many other things. For that reason I think PG confuses the trait of being a hacker as having a casual relationship with being likely to succeed as an entrepreneur. But on the note of paying freelancers, that can get pretty damn expensive if you're just flat out paying for solutions before they're validated as businesses.