I’m counting on people who can leverage their experience there into becoming a valued contributor for a start-up with 15-150 employees. That’s neither only the founders, or every single early employee. For the second time: I don’t think that the strict dichotomy everyone-or-the-founder that you cast on top of my point helps you understand it.

I think the engineers who worked in the teams that built things like BigTable at Google, RedShift at Amazon, React at Facebook, AirFlow at AirBnB, etc. all have a CV that, in a company trying to address a related problem, would be valuable. Many are given more responsibility, so you probably want to think less of a specific role and more of progression: an engineer who went from junior to senior internally in a handful or years, and was then promoted to principal at a new company, or from senior to principal and promoted to director.

I know (from my own repeated experience) that either that experience or the ability to reproduce framework rapidly is not just a big trump card in interviews, but also often quoted to investors, especially early on. I reported for a year and a half to someone who introduced himself as having “killed the Fail Whale” (Twitter’s infamous symbol that the service was down): he lead an engineering team in charge of the refactoring and service reliability. His name won’t mean much to you, but I know that this experience justified a comfortable compensation when he changed jobs, and a title of VP; his experience also justified an order of magnitude more money raised. There was little doubt he could use that money to grow and lead the then 35-engineer team and prevent the website from going down as often as it used to. It took him several months, some external consultants, a dozen more engineers, but at not point was he worried: he knew the culture, the methods, the priorities that would lead to a stable site, in spite of the insane growth.

When he refused to my team some key requests, he was very convincing because he was able to detail how that would make keeping the site up more difficult; and he was clear about priorities. We found a solution asking someone else, a principal engineer: he had joined as his first job a competitor to AirBnB, worked there four years until he was senior, wasn’t convinced they could win market shares, got hired by us as a principal because of his experience. He was also one of the dozen of personnel whose skill was explicitly known by the investors.

About half of the senior engineers (that’s more than a dozen) were hired from companies where either I, or one of those two people worked, on our explicit recommendations.

I don’t know if there are early staff at Google that “do not have experience […] building a company”. I’ve had the pleasure to talk to chefs (i.e. senior cooking staff) who moved from Google to Facebook, the facilities manager who did the same, a couple of the bus drivers: they all got recommended, promoted, because they genuinely provided exceptional service, shown fantastic initiative and understood what that type of company values.

I couldn’t imagine companies without that kind of support, managerial, operational, technical, etc. I would certainly never describe the people who built those companies with me like you did, and I can’t imagine that the founders and CEOs of the companies that I‘ve named would either. None lives under the illusion that they did it alone.