I recommend that you read this book: Psycho-Cybernetics by Dr Maxwell Maltz. If you practice all the exercises in the book, particularly the one at the end of chapter two, you will start seeing tangible results after day 21 and significant results in a few months. I cannot recommend this enough!
This is success bias at work. Victors write history and can say whatever they want! Mark Pincus has accomplished a lot and duly deserves credit but it doesn't mean we should lap up his lessons from the soccer pitch as the secret sauce for success in business. A team with no bad people is better than a team of stars? Common now! Sounds like what you'd find in a stodgy corporation not a successful startup!
If you want to go that far back let's be fair. How about IE? Didn't they come from nowhere to dethrone netscape and capture ~90% of the market when all the talking heads on Wall street had written them off for lacking a "compelling internet strategy"?
Interesting...except, if you are going to do most of the talking how are you really going to find out more about the candidate? I think the problem isn't that you let the candidate do most of the talking. It is that you got lazy (as you admit) and didn't listen intently enough and ask probing questions. I think it is more useful to really probe and find out if someone understands something in sufficient depth and demonstrates a mastery of programming/software engineering principles than to answer high level questions in broad areas. The latter is much easier to do!