I understand, and am not arguing with you. Whatever you want to call them, that "second round of folks before later" is harder to hire than the founders. They're employees, not principals, and you can't bullshit them.
I'm not disputing harder to hire, I'm asking whether harder to hire is a negative or a useful indicator.
The conventional wisdom is, "go to the Bay Area, it'll be much easier to find smart developers." It is, in fact, very easy to find smart developers in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, they work for Google.