Software companies are now like home builders

> If you could hire better engineers, you could build things your competitors couldn't.

I disagree this was true 5 or 15 years ago, just like it is not true today.

Building a product your competitor could not was always about full product execution, and finding the right engineers to do it once you had everything else in place (like knowing what is the product you should be building and then iterating on it together) was the easier part.