I always liked the story of the "Microsoft Five" who joined Facebook early on. I would pay a little more if I could hire a small team of developers who already had experience working together. I bet a team of 3 or 4 devs who shopped their skills this way could demand a premium.
I'm not familiar with that story but I know teams of copywriters & art directors that do this currently in the ad industry to great success. I'm not sure how well that would work for a startup though, seems like an easy way to mess up the culture.
In Facebook's case (see quora link from beambot), it seems like the instant injection of a high-quality core team permanently elevated the engineering culture and probably led to a lot of the success that followed. I could see it going the other way too. Maybe it just accelerates your startup towards its inevitable destiny, one way or the other...
