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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

If you respect Woz, you should also know that Apple was not the only company that was in the personal computing space when they started. They were just passionate about what they were doing and they did the best job at it.

I myself hate the cliche "Ideas are worth nothing it's all about execution", but at the same time I also have no respect for people who think they have the best ideas but never execute on them.

Ideas do matter, except that most ideas are too abstract, and you won't realize if your idea works or not unless you start it. That's why "idea people" with no execution are never respected by people who actually do stuff. Of course, that is, when we're talking about startups. if you're an actual philosopher who theorizes abstract things, you are an idea person and I totally respect philosophers

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You are correct that Apple was a duplicate. At a certain level, just about all companies are. Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land. Same with movies. Do you really want to see something truly original because you will recognize nothing.

However, having no respect for people who think they have the best ideas but never execute on them is going a bit far. Arthur C Clarke wrote an article

EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL RELAYS: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage? http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_oct_305-308.html

It calculated the geostationary belt and showed that it could be applied to communications satellites. No patent, no possibility of exploiting it. Basically a really interesting blog post before there were blogs.

So I give credit to great ideas that are short of startup potential. What I yawn at is startups not based on great ideas. I'll grant that there are successful startups out there that aren't based on great ideas, just execution. But they don't interest me. So fundamentally, that's a personal evaluation.

"Great idea" is an extremely subjective thing, and I don't even mean it in a loose sense.

Many people think great ideas are things that are so obvious like flying cars or fixing cancer, fixing aging, going to mars, fixing racism, fixing global warming, etc. They are great ideas, but at the same time they are all just obvious ideas. If something is obviously a great idea and has great market potential, it would be stupid for a large company to be not working on it. That's why these ideas are mostly tackled by already large companies and almost never by startups. In fact I have never seen a startup that succeeded by working on an idea that was already obvious to the masses, nor have I seen world-changing come out of this. Most groundbreaking ideas started out as something you would think is not one of those "great ideas". Use the same Apple example, most people didn't think personal computers would change the world, they just thought it was some nerdy tech thing that would stay as a fringe culture. That's why IBM got into the game late.

That said, I am not disagreeing with you that philosophers are bad, I already mentioned that. I use the term "philosophers" loosely here. For philosophers, theorizing is execution, it's not like they can build something. And I totally appreciate thought experiments.

>I myself hate the cliche "Ideas are worth nothing it's all about execution"

I strongly agree, simply because I have worked at failed startups that executed well on bad ideas.

And yes, in reality you can't cleanly separate idea from execution. How much of Apple's success was transforming the idea "affordable personal computer" to "reimagine technology to become ubiquitous and indispensible to everyone on the planet"?

The later need to show their work in detailed logic way, e. g, a book. That's real idea with execution.

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