That's not what we look for. The evidence so far (and there is now quite a lot of it) suggests that it's more important that the founders be very effective people than great programmers.

I suspect this is true even in research, but certainly in startups, someone who is reasonably smart and very driven will beat someone who is brilliant but ineffectual.

How hard people work also depends to a large extent on the systemic environment in which the work takes place. The Hawthorne studies showed this back in the 20s. The basic idea was these researchers went to to study the effect of lighting on worker productivity. They went to this factory with two rooms, and they dimmed the lights in one and walked around and asked people how they felt about the change. The worker's output was measured in pieces produced, so it was easy to measure productivity. What they found was that when the room was dimmer, worker productivity increased. This didn't seem right to them, so they made the lights even dimmer and productivity increased again. And then they made it so it was almost pitch black and the productivity was at an all time high. What they found was that worker productivity was increasing due to having the scientists walk around and take interest in the factory workers. (I would have linked to the Wikipedia article, but it isn't very good.)

There are a whole series of studies since then showing that the idea that some people are hard workers and some people are lazy is misleading at best, because someone's work ethic is more determined by the environment than any intrinsic quality (although different people need different environments).

This is the same basic idea behind the Milgram experiments, where he showed that the majority of people had the capability to carry out the deeds of the Nazi's under the right systemic environment, and that the evil deeds of the Germans weren't so much intrinsic to the people themselves rather than the larger social system.

Even today there is a lot of really really valuable research coming out in this area. Just as an example, this is a good article on using psychology to motivate contributions to online communities:

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/ling.html

Bob Kraut has a lot of really good papers in this area relating to the Internet that are around online.

I would keep PG's advice in mind when raising children.

I still remember visiting a music store and seeing this dude take a guitar off the wall and blow everyone away with his talent. The things he could do with his fingers were amazing. He was probably a better guitarist than Dylan, Lennon, and Springstein. He was certainly a better guitarist than Andre3000, who (I read somewhere) used G, C, and E minor as the basis for "Hey Ya" because they were the three chords he knew how to play on the guitar.

Unlike the musicians mentioned above, he was also available for private beginner lessons ;)

While truly great programmers will help the business become profitable and successful sooner, they are by no means required.

I think there are plenty of non-vc funded startup businesses out there that do ok with so-so programmers. You just don't hear about them in the media because they are privately held.