Yeah. Lots of startup experiences is a good indicator of lots of technical war stories, and having been "that guy" or part of a team where a bunch of seemingly workable approaches to problems failed spectacularly is a _very_ valuable skillset to bring to the table with a bunch of fresh grads or early career devs. You probably need another decade to get the same sort of collections of war stories about managing people and teams and higher management, which is another skillset the "adult supervision" needs.

Having said that, I've seen teams of fresh grads and bootcamp trained devs, where some 30 year old adult supervision might have saved projects or companies from expensive or existential disasters. "No, we are NOT going to build this critical project's frontend on the JavaScript framework you and two of your bootcamp buddies spent the last 4 weekends writing."

Is there any way to become that guy without doing 1-2 years of grunt work under the adult supervision "guy"?