That's a complicated statement. The depth of your own technical knowledge sets a ceiling on the depth of the people willing to do technical implementation for you. After all, most people are unwilling to do grunt work for people dumber than themselves. The main thing your workers get out of it is a learning experience and the chance to be mentored by others more experienced than themselves, so if you're not more experienced, why should they work for you?
So yeah, you get more leverage by using your knowledge to mentor others to do the development for you. But you could end up getting stuck as CEO of a startup that's in a backwater corner of the industry, rather than as a developer in a company that's doing interesting world-changing stuff that you can then leverage when you start your company later.
It's a simple statement. You confuse naïveté with stupidity. If there is a "ceiling" as you describe, then Sergei and Larry must have godlike intelligence to have 20,000 engineers working for them.
The point is not "I'm not capable of coding this, I must hire someone smarter", it's "I'll manage someone to do the coding I don't have time for, and they can observe my attempts to run the rest of the business (or whatever)."
Well, I can measure the value I'm creating (at least in the short term) relatively objectively by seeing how much money I make. And I make more money (and just generally get a lot more projects done) by managing other programmers.
Regarding 'backwater corners' - isn't this article about how to provide value in the backwater corners of the software industry? Printing and generating bingo cards is about as backwater as you can get, but I see nothing wrong with that. I'm also in the food industry and I understand that you don't grow up to be McDonald's (a restaurant which has - from my perspective - provided incredible value all over the world) overnight. Ray Kroc grew McDonald's by serving what was then an expensive burger to a niche clientele. Then he expanded from there. I don't see why a similar strategy isn't sane in the software industry.
So yeah, you get more leverage by using your knowledge to mentor others to do the development for you. But you could end up getting stuck as CEO of a startup that's in a backwater corner of the industry, rather than as a developer in a company that's doing interesting world-changing stuff that you can then leverage when you start your company later.