Instead of thinking of them as some superstar, think of it like hiring an IC - you want someone who can, and will ship, especially in the face of ambiguity. If you hire a mega talented engineer who specialises in designing fault tolerant distributed systems, you’re going to build a fault tolerant distributed system. If you hire someone who ships scrappy features and doesn’t leave a giant mess behind you, you have a much better chance of success. Finding those people is the same as finding any other developer.

> actually hire the superstars to join your startup as the early employees/partners?

You have to become a superstar first.

I had the good luck of living down the street from the AirBedAndBreakfast founders in San Francisco in 2008 and we'd commute together to our Tuesday night YC dinners in Mountainview.

I picked up early that Nate was already a superstar coder, Joe was a superstar designer, and Brian was a superstar designer and salesman.

I knew I was not, and had to double down and practice, practice, practice.

Craftsmanship comes first. It took those guys decades of practice at their crafts before they founded AirBedAndBreakfast.

Think of Paul Graham. Before he created HackerNews and YC, he had already written and published a book on Lisp! A master craftsman.

Craftsmanship comes first.

If you are not a master at your craft, don't even waste your time trying to recruit superstars. Instead, spend your time on practice.

maybe the superstar idea is somewhat of an illusion, and they are actually just some pretty smart friend of the founder?

You become friends with pretty smart guys that have the potential to become superstars. Which superstar will join a wannabe startup?

Either they're the founders or friends thereof or you're struck-by-lightening lucky.

Realistically tell yourself that 10x developers are a silly myth and the people you were able to hire for pennies from the local demographic are the superstars, and try not to hang your business model on them actually being the best in their field. As long as you don't fact check that against reality it'll be OK.

How many startups actually need superstars? Most of them are doing glorified CRUD work. There’s nothing wrong with that!

But companies should be honest with themselves about what they need. Everyone still seems obsessed with being able to pretend they somehow got the absolute best deal on the employment market instead of interviewing for the position itself.

It's easy. They all happen to live in SF and be working on a YC start-up...

/s