[robbfitzsimmons]

The key consideration for me here is "they communicate well."

As someone who's just recently started to consider full-time hires beyond our founding team, it's ridiculous how important this is relative to how little it's talked about. The other traits - "avoiding crises", "doing their research" - often boil down to effectively working together with your teammates and finding information / reaching decisions quickly.

And I do think it's got something to do with educating programmers. Working with interns and contractors we've had at Harvard, MIT, etc., the best have been Olin College (http://olin.edu).

I'm not going to gush about it in this comment too much, but suffice it to say the best communicators about technical problems are usually the ones who spend the most time working in teams and presenting their work, and those are Oliners to a tee.