[notduncansmith]

Absolutely, hence my comment towards the end about having T-shaped individuals. I worked on a startup team recently where responsibilities were pretty cleanly divided: I worked on the front end, and a coworker worked on the backend.

Both of us were much stronger at our chosen domains than the other, but we were also both strong enough on the other end to fill in any gaps. If we were doing mostly front-end stuff for a sprint, he was able to jump in without me having to worry about it, and vice-versa.

IMO, that's the kind of full-stack developers that early-stage startups (that aren't specifically tech-focused, eg language processing) need.