Let me tell you a story from when I was first employee at a startup long ago. The founders were a husband and wife couple, and the husband had gradually built up the site over 2 years of evening/weekend time. This was a typical late 90s hacker solution: cgi-perl script stuff.

When we got funded, the angel investor put in both money and his CTO from previous ventures, the kind of person you are calling a "great" technical co-founder. But I didn't find that out till later.

He was a big, taciturn guy, zero kool-aid about him. He almost seemed to be slumbering half the time. He said very little during all our excited brainstorming and spitballing about what to do now that we finally had some money. When technical questions were raised, he described the strategy, but in very brief, informal and (seemed to me) sloppy ways, and in a tone that seemed to suggest that we could talk about the business all we wanted, but that the tech stuff was not really up for debate. Whatever we talked about, he merely said, "yeah, don't worry. that can be done."

Once we'd set the new direction, and the founders and I got busy on the biz side of things (this was a live, thriving site with a lot going on, and a lot to do), I got increasingly slightly annoyed by the CTO. He seemed to be sitting around doing nothing. Dabbling. Poking around the site on occasion, but just as often doing nothing visibly relevant.

I was almost ready to write him off as a bs-artist, when one weekend, 6-8 weeks after I first met him, something happened.

I left late one Friday night, having put in a decent day of work on the biz stuff. He was looking at some code idly, in the server room.

The next day, I checked in briefly. He was still there. Now he was typing.

On Sunday, when I checked in again, I was blown away. He had rewritten the core of the entire site, the whole damn thing, with a far more modern, professional, db-driven design in a completely different language, ported the data from the production site over, and had the basic site running on our test servers, with a nice new engine humming under it.

One weekend, that's it, and he'd reinvented, faster, better, stronger, something the founder-CEO, no programming slouch himself, had taken 2 years to build up. I'd assumed it would take him months to execute the tech strategy he'd outlined. He finished 80% in one weekend, leaving some minor polishing to be done by a couple of junior developers. In the months that followed, progress was similar.

That's what a star looks like. I've discovered that the capability to pull off this sort of miracle has almost nothing to do with degrees or where you got them, talking a big game or dropping impressive jargony references. I've seen the same personality pattern in others of the type I've met since.

If you are an average sort of engineer like me, it is relatively easy to detect people like this after you've met your first true example, but I can't give you the formula. It is a gut instinct that fires, after the first time you meet one of these people. Call it a "star-dar." A sense of still, deep waters, deceptively calm and quiet.

So try to develop the pattern recognition. It may take you longer if you are not an engineer (us average engineers have a very convenient benchmark for "great", ourselves). Meet a few such people who are acknowledged as stars. Throw away all the resume type superficial details and preconceived notions of what such people are like, and just spend time with such people. The cues are often weird and may have nothing to do with programming. They may be young or old, with many degrees or none, and vary in a lot of ways, but there is an "It" factor each time.

With this guy, here's an example of the sort of thing I mean. We had a little indoor putting game in our offices, and we'd often play with a bit to relax. The CEO was decent... he'd often sink several putts in a row. For all of us, it was a game like coin-tossing. We'd sink and miss putts in a somewhat random fashion. None of us was a serious golfer. It was mostly social fun.

The first few times the CTO played with us, he put on the same kind of coin-tossing display we did.

Then late one night, we played again. This time, he took it seriously.

He sank something like 20-30 putts in a row. He only quit because he got bored. It was like he was in a trance. It was almost scary watching him.

That inspired me to try and induce such trance-like focus and "flow" in myself. I did manage to do it once after a lot of trying (I got something like 20 putts in a row too, and the trance is a slightly unsettling experience). But the point is, that guy could regularly, and apparently on-demand call up such periods of trance-like focus, during which miracles happened.

I am not easily impressed, but I have to say, each time I encounter someone like this, it feels like a special privilege, like looking at the Grand Canyon.