I believe PayPal is the Fairchild Semiconductors of its time and likewise will be recognized for the quality and subsequent success of its key founding employees. I agree that the ability to recruit and build a strong founding team is the most important life-and-death contribution that a Founder/CEO can made to a startup. My own experience is that in startups, it is all about trust and trust is in fact a far more important currency than even money. But trust in a startup has a different meaning than trust in everyday life. By trust, I am talking about trusting a person’s judgment and their abilities. So after you recruit them, you need to build them into a cohesive team by developing a trust among them so that when someone agrees to a schedule or proposes a budget, they are in fact doing so knowing what they are capable of delivering and understanding the consequence if they don’t. They clearly have done that at PayPal and done it well. Excellent article, a good read.