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If you take a look at successful companies you'll find that the ideas behind them are in no way unique, and more often than not they're not based on an idea but on a market. Here are the ten most profitable companies in the Forbes 1000 list and what they do:

ExxonMobil - Oil & Gas Operations

Gazprom Russia - Oil & Gas Operations

Royal Dutch Shell - Oil & Gas Operations

Chevron - Oil & Gas Operations

BP - Oil & Gas Operations

PetroChina - Oil & Gas Operations

General Electric - Conglomerates

Microsoft - Software & Services

Toyota Motor - Consumer Durables

Nestlé - Food, Drink & Tobacco

Only General Electric and Microsoft seem to be based on an idea, the others adress a market and create a product to fit that market. And it can be argued whether these are successes because of the idea - Edison tried thousands of different configurations before he actually invented the lightbulb, and Microsoft bought their first hit-product DOS from Tim Paterson and became successful by selling it, not inventing it. Execution apperas to have been paramount in their success.

These examples aren't unique. Even Google, often touted as the canonical "idea" company couldn't sell their technology, even though they tried. They only created Google after futile attempts at selling the idea to among others Yahoo.

"Even Google, often touted as the canonical "idea" company couldn't sell their technology, even though they tried. They only created Google after futile attempts at selling the idea to among others Yahoo."

Yes, idea+execution is what matters. But, without the great idea, the execution doesn't amount to much, at least in the high-tech area (in the industrial/manufacturing/oil business, there is not much room for new ideas, so of course execution is the primary determinant of success)

Before Google came out with their search algorithm, there were lots of companies trying to do search. I believe Altavista was considered the best at the time.

What did Google have that all these other search engines didn't? Was it execution? I doubt it. A lot of very capable people were and are working on many other search engines, and yet none has the market penetration that Google has. What Google had was a much better algorithm, i.e. a much better idea on how to rank search results.

Let's play a thought experiment:

I'm Paul Graham, and I've got a fantastic, knock-your-socks-off idea for a business. How much will you pay me for it?

OR

I'm Travis. I've got a mediocre idea, but have spent a lot of time learning about my customers and market. I've built a kickass piece of software that solves the pain. But, again, my idea isn't that great (think Craigslist: the idea of online classifieds isn't exactly a great one, or a novel/clever one...) Will you pay me more for this?

Regarding "I'm Paul Graham, and I've got a fantastic, knock-your-socks-off idea for a business. How much will you pay me for it?":

First off, if you patented it, and I can see a lot of value from licensing the idea, then yes, I will pay a lot for it.

Second, I don't get why people are so focused on valuing an idea in-and-of-itself. Just because when some Joe says "I have a great idea" we don't attach any monetary value to that, doesn't mean that "ideas are useless".

It's like if some Joe says "I'm great at executing". Nobody will pay him for that. That has no monetary value. But that doesn't mean that "execution is useless".

It's the combination of idea+execution that has monetary value.

Ok, I agree that specific ideas have value. However, I think they're not very valuable regardless of quality, because there is little to differentiate a high quality idea from a low quality idea until they are executed. Then your differentiation takes place after-the-fact, making it useless at early stages.

If specific ideas are to have specific value, there must be a common method of differentiation. How do you tell the difference between a high quality idea and a terrible one?

Finally, if ideas have so much value, how come the market has basically been against the "idea guy", and almost entirely values execution (success = traction, revenue)?

Ideas matter, but not that much. We'd all rather have good ideas than bad ideas, which proves theres some value in the idea itself.

But GREAT ideas usually come from some form of execution and iteration. Great ideas just don't come from sitting and brainstorming what to build your startup into. Using your comparison of Google's pagerank, PageRank wasn't drummed up and perfected as an idea before it was executed. Sergey and Larry probably had a concept (born from their research and creativity) and executed it. What evolved is what we now and call PageRank. So great ideas are really only recognized after the fact.

I agree with your statement "GREAT ideas usually come from some form of execution and iteration". Yes, sitting down and trying to implement something inevitably shows its weaknesses and, if you're smart, helps you improve it.

Regarding "Ideas matter, but not that much" : If they don't matter that much, why don't VCs and YC omit that part and just ask you who you are and what your track record is? If execution is the most important thing, they should not even ask what the idea behind the startup is, since if you have a great team with great execution track record, then surely you will find something to implement and execute on, right? The fact is, the ideas behind startups are asked about, because just having some brilliant executioners sitting around trying to find something to execute brilliantly doesn't make sense. Ideas do matter.

PG said something like "good ideas are evidence of how smart you are". VCs want smart people, and great ideas combined with great founders make for a great combination - on paper. VCs are in it to make money, so they have to play their percentages. Seeing good ideas helps validate the founders.

Ideas also change over time. Sometimes overnight. If one day you think you've got a great idea, and a few months later you've evolved into something else, then really, how great was the original idea?

Did the idea behind Twitter, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, etc change overnight?

Yes, startups do often change their idea overnight, and that shows that the original idea wasn't great, but that doesn't mean that there are no great ideas.

By the way, the "good ideas are evidence of how smart you are" is a bit BS. If all the VCs and/or YC cared about was that someone was smart, and since there are tons of other indicators (where they went to school, how many other successful startups they had, other smart people say how smart these people are, etc.), then if the VCs and/or YC knew by some other indicators that a group was comprised of very smart people then they wouldn't need to know what the idea behind the startup is.

The fact that VCs and YC always ask what the idea is behind the startup before funding it, even when they know the team is full of very smart people (e.g. from multiple successful previous startups), it means that they don't just use your ideas to gauge how smart you are. They really do care what the idea is.

Let me try another tack. You're out with a friend and your friend remarks on a great service.product he/she just bought that's brand new. Yet you had the idea for that product too. You tell your friend this. Do you really expect your friend's honest reaction to be anything other than, "So what?" See, your idea never got anywhere -- while it was in your hands. The idea became great when someone brought it to market.

But that doesn't at all prove that ideas are useless.

It just proves that ideas+execution is what matters. After all, the person who ultimately made the product your friend bought, needed the idea for the product before getting off his butt and executing it.

Just because some people have "great ideas" and never get off their butt to execute them doesn't diminish the value of great ideas to people who do execute.

You're missing all the actual work involved in actually executing on that idea. It is only when this process begins do you develop the idea, iterate on it, and uncover new sub-ideas that actually matter or are more integral to money making or bringing it to market etc than the initial "great idea" in the first place. Looking over these comments it seems you are just unwilling to accept that execution is the process of developing an idea into something that has value. All ideas initially are worthless.

"Ideas are a dime a dozen" turns out to be true.

Someone else here pointed to oil companies. Rockefeller was going to drill for oil when he saw what was going on. But then he got a broader perspective and saw that refining the oil would actually be easier (he didn't have to hunt for the oil) and more profitable (middleman status). How much would that idea be worth if he hadn't done it? Zero.

The only thing that is "worth" something is what money can buy.

I understand your objection, but this is the way it is.

Ideas are useless in the sense that at any one time, many people could have the exact same idea. Ideas do "get in the air." So in that respect, ideas can be seen as commodities. It's getting the idea out there as something people can buy/use that matters. All writers understand this. It's not the story that was never written or never published that matters -- it's the story people can read or buy.

Let's take "The Da Vinci Code" as an example. How many people had the idea behind that book? Not that many. Yes, Dan Brown had to sit down and write it, but it's the storyline (the "idea" behind the book) that got millions of people hooked worldwide.

From what I have read, it seems Dan Brown isn't that good of an author anyway. Thousands of other writers could have written the story better than he did, if he had commissioned them to do so.

There are tons of excellent writers out there that would write "the Great American novel" if only they could figure out what to write about. So, it's not the execution but the great idea that is a more rare resource.

A lot of luck and marketing took place to make The Da Vinci Code a success.

If it hadn't made money, and sat on the shelves today, would it still have been a great idea? We can really only tell looking backwards.

The tools and tricks of marketing are well known. They can be applied to any book. But they cannot help every book become a runaway hit. The content of the book matters too. (Yes, great books without good marketing will fail, but that just shows that both ingredients are necessary)

The same is with startups. The tools and tricks of marketing and execution are well known. They can be applied to any startup. But they cannot help every startup become a runaway hit. The idea behind the startup matters too.

>>>Let's take "The Da Vinci Code" as an example. How many people had the idea behind that book? Not that many.

There was a big plagiarism suit in England about this, so it's not the best example. Besides which, you will learn on your own that ideas are less important than realizing them. It's a hard lesson to learn and it took me many, many years to see it, You will too.

So what if it was plagiarized? The idea is what made the book successful. Whether that idea was Dan Brown's or he stole it from someone else says nothing about the value of the idea behind making "The Da Vinci Code" a huge hit.

Are you serious? This is one of the dumbest things I've read on here. Writing a novel is execution. There are hundreds of these books with similar story lines that never got anywhere because of inferior writing. There are thousands of fantasy books that never became Harry Potter.

Are you claiming that Dan Brown and JK Rowling are the best in the world at writing their type of fiction? Maybe they are, but from what I understand, from a literary standpoint these two are not the best writers.

The problem is ideas do not exist. It is only when they morph into a tangible reality that they can be tested, verified, iterated on, and developed.

Put another way, an idea can be as great and fantastic and beautiful and groundbreaking as you dream it up to be - but none of that matters if it exists in your head only. Only when the idea enters a tangible reality can you really verify these claims. Does it work? how the hell do you know if it does not exist?

PageRank was verified to be a good idea only after they built a tangible search engine to test it with. And I'd argue their initial idea was iterated upon so much through the course of these real-life tests, that you can no longer give overwhelming credit to some spark of genius that bolted into sergey's head one fine day. It's about testing and iteration in real life not about mystical ideas seemingly sent down from the stars - that to me is why ideas are worthless.

If you have the ability to execute on your idea to test it's validity, then it's worth a lot! Think Chatroulette...hotmail....youtube...etc. Conversely, if you can't execute on the idea then it's worth far less and you should share it widely, get feedback, and work towards building a team around the idea that can execute upon it....

I think the meme has gotten popular because it's mostly oriented to people that can't execute on their ideas....and thus it holds some truth.

A lot of this is about definitions.

An idea is useless.

A piece of execution is useless.

Execution means taking an idea, any idea, trying it out and then coming up with new ideas at the same or lower level and trying them out.

A good high-level idea by itself? Totally worthless. A team that can take a bad high-level idea, morph it into a mediocre one, then, through trial and error pound out the thousands of little ideas that make a business hum? Awesome.

As I mention below, I don't get why people are so focused on valuing an idea in-and-of-itself. Just because when some Joe says "I have a great idea" we don't attach any monetary value to that, doesn't mean that "ideas are useless". It's the combination of idea+execution that has monetary value.

Also, regarding your definition "Execution means taking an idea, any idea, trying it out and then coming up with new ideas at the same or lower level and trying them out", is this the accepted definition of "execution"?

I thought execution was (1) Using tools to build the idea, (2) Using tools like SEO optimization, web analytics, conversion tracking, Google AdWords, etc to make your site visible to the masses and make it "sticky" to users, (3) Using marketing, blogging, social networking, contacting tech media, etc, to get the word out, and (4) Adapting to user feedback to modify your main idea to make sure it is closer to what people want.

Only (4) is related to your definition, and is not the main thing I think of when I think of "execution" regarding a tech startup.

And people keep bringing up the act of morphing the initial idea into something that works. As I mentioned below:

(a) If the original idea gets scrapped, then, yes, it wasn't that great to begin with. That doesn't mean there are no great ideas,

and

(b) Did Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, change the original idea behind these sites? Yes, the details may have changed, but I think the fundamental idea behind each of these has not changed. Most of the great hits out there are still doing what they started out to do.

Look up the story behind Facebook. Its not like Mark Zuckerberg had an idea, wrote it up, and approached investors.

He executed, plain and simple.

Is the "ideas are useless" meme being put out there just because so many newbies to the startup culture are too enamored with their ideas and think that the idea is all that matters, and so they have to be hit hard with the "ideas are useless" to snap them out of that thinking and start valuing execution?

I wouldn't exactly phrase it that way, but I think that does sum it up fairly well. I have spent a lot of time around the "gifted" community and I think an awful lot of extremely intelligent people are fundamentally lazy because, compared to most folks, they tend to skate through life and don't really have to work that hard.

When I was in 11th grade and a member of a college level math honor society, I tutored a mentally retarded 10th grade girl who had gotten herself into algebra. No one else in the honor society doing tutoring wanted to tutor her because it was too hard to teach her. So I always ended up working with her. She worked harder for her C's and D's than I ever did for my A's and B's. She never got in a snit over not understanding something. I learned to explain math concepts at least 3 ways without breaking a sweat and up to 12 ways if that was what it took. It was one of the most valuable experiences I ever had.

After something is built and makes a billion dollars or so, the world calls the founders/originators "geniuses". People who have the subjective experience of routinely being smarter than everyone else in the room often have trouble with certain realities and are often overconfident in their abilities in some ways -- for example, they tend to think if you disagree with them or have some criticism, you simply are too dumb to understand and can't possibly have a real point. They tend to think this because repeated experience in the real world has taught them this is typically true. So I think a lot of very smart people kind of identify themselves with the after-the-fact pronouncement of "genius" and gloss over what it took to accomplish the stuff that ultimately convinced the world this label was appropriate. And I think that is why you see this mantra that ideas aren't worth dirt, you actually have to roll up your sleeves and do the work to have anything of value.

Ask HN: The value of ideas