Totally fair, thanks for pointing that out.

I would extend that even further, I'm a fan of the idea that you should thoroughly vet the founders for excellence if you want to maximize your chances of ending up at a great startup. Not just your eng manager and peers.

Like with your "A player" engineers example, founders need to be exceptional if they want to attract great talent to work for them. So if you're pretty unimpressed with them as you're getting to know the company, the likelihood that the team they hired makes up for that deficiency is very low, and you'll end up around non-A players.