"Ya, but I don't know how to build that", said a seasoned engineer and first-time technical founder. They were in search of a good customer problem and I was helping them ideate. That response was a knee-jerk reaction to an idea I suggested—one that didn't seem technically hard. My respect for this person instantly dropped. And I felt a tinge of disgust too. There's no shame in knowing your limits but what irked me was the utter lack of belief and technical flexibility. Necessary (but not sufficient) attributes, I believe.
Necessary for what?...Well, to be a superbuilder. In the book Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future, the authors (Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman) introduce this concept of a superbuilder, which is way more than a brilliant engineer. In the hundreds of startups they've invested in, the ones that achieved remarkable success all had a superbuilder on the original team. A superbuilder exhibits the kind of belief and flexibility necessary to breakthrough as a startup.
You mean a "10x engineer"?
The 10x engineer, the rockstar engineer, the coding ninja—you've heard of their legend. They're technical ability and productivity is off the charts. But being a 10x engineer doesn't make a you a superbuilder. Being a 10x engineer is about skill, but being a superbuilder is also about mindset.
The mindset of superbuilders
From the book Pattern Breakers:
A superbuilder is someone endowed with not just technical prowess but also insatiable curiosity, unwavering tenacity, and a staunch belief in their capability to surmount any technical hurdle.
They capture a layer of nuance that's missing from discourse about technical excellence—one I've had a hard time communicating until now. They make the point (and I agree) that because a start-up is going to face so many unanticipated challenges, having the ability—embedded inside the team—to build whatever unexpected thing comes up next is invaluable. Because the superbuilder is not constrained technically, they can rapidly build the company out of a sticky situation.
I also believe their ferocious intelligence entails they're not easily intimidated. Not by problems, but also not by competition. In early-stage start-ups, I've seen founders shy away from a market because their start-up competitors have, e.g. more funding, or a more credentialed team. Sometimes, this can be a wise move, but most of the time, it's motivated by plain fear.
Examples of superbuilders
So technically brilliant, hyper-productive, and boundlessly optimistic!? That's a rare combo!
Indeed. I've had the privilege of meeting a few superbuilders while working at Apple and Google. They seem unstoppable: you could point them at any engineering problem and they spit out a solution in due time. I've learned that one tell for a superbuilder is if they unabashedly follow they're curiosity. A superbuilder I know from Apple had a non-linear resume, happy to make the jump from, e.g. ML engineering to quantitative finance. It comes from their fearlessness.
But let me share some legendary superbuilders that will feel familiar:
Nate Blecharczyk
Nate was the technical co-founder of Airbnb. And although his contributions don't get much attention, his ability to build whatever was necessary is an unsung aspect of Airbnb's success. From Pattern Breakers: "Nate created a Google AdWords hack that allowed them to target specific people in specific cities. He built one-click integration that allowed Airbnb hosts to get their listings viewed by Craigslist's millions of users, which was a clever hack...But Craigslist didn't have a public API. So Nate found a workaround that cleverly integrated with Craigslist, allowing hosts to autopost their Airbnb listings. The tactic pushed the boundaries of platform etiquette and terms of use, and Craigslist eventually made changes to prevent this kind of automated cross-posting. By that time, Airbnb had already gained substantial traction." Nate was/is a powerhouse. He scaled Airbnb's platform to accommodate millions of users, navigated the labyrinth of payment processing, instilled robust systems for host and guest identity verification to foster trust, and safeguard their review mechanism from potential manipulations. Some of these challenges seem quaint with the luxury of modern software infrastructure, but imagine trying to tackle all these problem in the early 2010's, when much of that infrastructure didn't exist or was premature.
Chris Lattner
Chris Lattner is the inventor of LLVM, Clang, Swift, MLIR, and now Modular (I'm sure I'm missing some accomplishments). This guy has made a career out of taking on problems that others see as impossible. Many experts claimed his efforts to replace GCC with a more approachable compiler stack, LLVM, was impossible. Later, his peers at Apple doubted the whole purpose of creating a new programming language, Swift, for mobile development. Now, he's working on silencing the haters again by building a totally new AI stack that's CUDA-free. For Chris, it seems there's no technical challenge too big to tackle.
Kyle Vogt
Kyle was a co-founder of Twitch and Cruise Automation (the self-driving car company), and he just started a robotics company called "The Bot Company". There are some epic stores about Kyle, like how he single-handedly built Twitch's live streaming stack from scratch. Another: when NBC threatened to shut down Justin.tv (the predecessor to Twitch) over copyrighted Olympic streams in 2008, Kyle (and co.) built a YouTube-like content monitoring tool over a weekend, convincing NBC to spare the platform. Here's Michael Seibel, a former co-founder of Twitch, on Kyle:
"One of the most important characteristics of the builder that I think people miss is faith. The superbuilder has the faith to build things they never built before. Kyle Vogt was a canonical example of this, even more than Emmett Shear. Emmett had a certain degree of confidence, but Kyle thought he could build anything. And it turns out that he pretty much could."
Robert Rodriguez
Robert's a filmmaker, known for El Mariachi, Desperado, Sin City, and the Spy Kids franchise. He's not a developer, but he still embodies the superbuilder archetype. His debut, El Mariachi (1992), was made on a shoestring budget of $7K, where he did almost everything: director, producer, cinematographer, editor, and more. He raised the funds through medical testing, shot the thing in two weeks with a borrowed camera, and edited on rudimentary equipment. Talk about scrappy. The movie ended up winning the Sundance Audience Award and grossed over $2M—a feat recognized by Guinness World Records as the lowest-budget film to earn $1M at the box office. This is not an isolated example. What makes Robert a superbuilder is that no matter what the constraints, it still finds a way to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
Final thoughts
Paul Graham said if you were to boil down all the traits that make a founder successful into two words, it would be "relentlessly resourceful". That's all a superbuilder really is. Someone who's radically courageous and creative, while packing serious technical heat.
I think everyone should want a superbuilder on their founding team. They give you a big unfair advantage. Superbuilders tackle unforeseen challenges (which the future inevitably holds), they accelerate the team's pace, attract other technical talent, and can be the difference between life or death for a startup.