He leveraged the YCombinator network to absorb a lot of information quickly. For example, I taught him basic networking (routers, switches, multicast/anycast, AS numbers, etc). I shared my 10 years of knowledge with him in a single two hour session because he's a genius, and then he ran from there, vastly exceeding my knowledge. I was there because Emmet asked Steve and Steve asked me to go over, and I was happy to help. I'm sure I wasn't the only one.