[georgemcbay]

In my experience tech and market success aren't nearly as related as your post suggests. As a 40 year old developer I've worked at a good number of companies (including startups and established ones) over the years including some that were, on average, technically very weak and yet very financially successful and some that were technically extremely strong and failed miserably.

All the tech talent in the world won't help if you are building something nobody wants, and if you are building something many people want you can get away with iffy technology, at least for a while (see: the first years of twitter).

[Sakes]

I'm 100 percent on board with your last sentence. But I didn't mean to imply that all you need is a good tech team to be successful. I was simply making an argument that maybe the OP is undervaluing his own / his tech team's technical abilities because he is comparing himself to an elite subset of devs/engineers.

Maybe these CEOs bragging about their rockstars is not so unreasonable when compared against the nation as a whole.

[aryastark]

Yep. If technical merit was all the mattered, we would all be using Xerox or Symbolics computers today. Those were some really smart guys. But you can't sell things no one can afford or needs.