That's an astute misreading of the article, but here's my take: the writer clearly must have been successful in his startup, otherwise he wouldn't feel qualified to speak on what counts for success in starting companies. Once you're successful, you have the best of all worlds: you can act as if you had no intellectual advantage, and had to get where you are solely through pluck and hard work. Then you can look down your nose at both groups: the intellectual guys with lousy jobs and the dim-witted stuffed shirts. No one will doubt that you are not both smarter than the geeks and better at decision-making than the decision guys, because the fact remains, you beat the odds and created a successful startup, and you're still rich. So, I think that's the lesson. You can be really smart, or really hard working, but odds are that you don't have your own company and you're not rich, so either way you don't know shit.