1. you are a badass founder and build something even more badass* and you succeed and then you become popular and people flock to you: https://twitter.com/adamdangelo https://twitter.com/paulg

2. you build something badass, but you're definitely not so badass yourself and in fact kind of mediocre and perchance happen to be successful, but people still flock to you: https://twitter.com/travisk https://twitter.com/plibin https://twitter.com/bhorowitz

I'd like some help in seeing through this, I can't make up my mind if (2) happens and if it does to what extend and do we have well-developed radars for detecting it even in communities like this one?

* badass can be things like clearly highly intelligent, competent scientist or engineer (e.g. MIT grad), excelled at in some other uncommon but major area in life. I do mean to exclude things like being good at business for example, this is not always an indicator of intelligence.

it's hard to describe what am I talking about without providing examples, but they may not be the best examples, they're just some to make a point and I could be totally wrong about those people.