Both sides in this story need to grow up if any of them ever want to launch a successful business.
I just read an article where a guy walked into a Hackathon and convinced a dream team to build his app, for free. The "ideas are worthless, execution is everything" is a curse. It's perpetuated by "technical" people to assert their value. The truth is both the idea and execution are extremely valuable. Don't believe it? Go look at all the beautiful apps in the app store that make nothing. Execution of terrible ideas.
It isn't difficult to recruit a technical team. Like it or not, with a good idea it hardly takes a "Python Dream Team" like in the article to get something done. Most applications aren't pushing technical boundaries. What it takes is money.
You know what is difficult? Convincing your banker to give you that money. That takes an idea and sales skills (both of which, apparently, Billy had).
Go to any 'meetup', its almost all 'idea people' and no tech talent. That means, its very hard to find that talent.
It doesn't take a 'dream team', no, but it does take some team at all. To get that, you have to convince Engineers your idea is good. Almost as hard as convincing the money men.
So lets reword: its hard to get the money, and hard to recruit the talent. That leaves the ideas, which are a dime a dozen. Clear?
Maybe because none of them are?
Again, you're assuming that these are all "great ideas", that just can't be discovered. I'm claiming the opposite. Go grab an app at random. I'll bet you it's an attractive, functional app that's utterly pointless. Thousands of people have executed their terrible ideas.
>you have to convince Engineers your idea is good
Exactly. The idea is important. As is the execution.
>That leaves the ideas, which are a dime a dozen. Clear?
Ideas are a dime a dozen. So are technical people. Good ideas are not, just as good technical people are not.
If I were starting a business, I'd take a great idea and random technical people over great technical people and a completely random idea.
Not hard at all. The first one takes time because you have to be really careful, from then on it's just a matter of contacting a recruiter and specifying exactly what you want, interviewing and making offers that are at market rates.
Investors are much, much harder.
It's really easy. You pay them.
Which is the crux of the issue here; Startup Weekends aren't meant as places to get/recruit cheap/free labor, so when they are used in that way, bad feelings happen.