Most startups have to deal with a common set of constrains: Little to no money. Few to no resources and customers. And very few people working for the company.
People’s skills, like most other things in life, are distributed along a normal distribution curve. Which means that most people’s skills are between okay and good, some are terrible and some are amazing.
Having worked in tech for all my life, I found that at the extreme edges of this normal distribution for nerds, you find that people are 100 times more productive than the average programmer/architect/designer. Furthermore some of these professionals are so accomplished that their output is beyond the ability of most of their peers; thus we might even say that they are infinitely more productive for truly creative, leading-edge projects.
This phenomenon is observably true — all the most cutting edge, most successful companies have a few very smart people at their core.
The trick then is to not hire a bunch of smart people but to hire a few very smart people!
If you run a company, it is your job to find these people. And if you don’t happen to run a company, I highly suggest finding companies which have very smart people at their core and work for them — it’s were the action and fun is.