"Hire the best engineers?" doesn't read like bullshit to me. A lot of startuos start out with scrappy teams who only half know what they're doing in their domain. That's partly because the domain changes every couple of weeks.

When you scale, that changes. It's crucial that you hire competent people for whatever your startup ended up doing. Have a lot of frontend? Hire UX designers and senior frontend engineers with 10+ years experience. Doing advanced AI? Hire someone who's been in that space for 5-10+ years. Etc. They're worth every penny.

The logic of fake-it-till-you-make it doesn't scale, but many don't realize it early enough.