Thanks for the note - I’m going to think about this.
Careers are made or broken on whether you get to be an idea person or an implementer.
If you're an idea person you get the lion's share of the credit for anything that goes right, and can always blame your failures on the implementor. Plus ideas are easier to come up with than implementations.
If you're an implementor you work hard, and then don't get much of the credit. But without implementors you simply don't have a product.
I've met FAR more competent implementers in my life than I have product owners. You seem (and others) seem to be arguing that there is some sort of market inefficiency here, but I don't see that.
And I say that as an implementer.
Well, bad ideas are easy and plentiful, and then execution is hard and everything.
But good ideas are hard, and then execution is routine.
By an "idea" Doerr meant just some short, off-hand statement, say, at a party or over the family Sunday dinner table, some summary might tell a neighbor over a back fence.
A good idea, however, may come with a stack of solid background research on the market, the problem to be solved, and a really good solution, say, the first good or a much better solution, with good barriers to entry, etc.
Here's an approach: Pick a problem that so far is solved at best poorly but where the first good solution will be close to a must have for enough people and revenue per person to make a successful business.
Then find a good solution. The solution might have secret sauce which was needed to solve the problem (why the problem wasn't solved 10 years ago) and that can also be a big barrier to entry.
It would help a lot to exploit current, comparatively dirt cheap, computing. If you write all your own code, then likely you don't need co-founders.
Venture capital won't much help because by the time you have enough for the VCs to write you a check, you will already have enough in traction that you can monetize to have enough revenue that you no longer need, want, or will accept their check, BoD, term sheet, vesting of what you already own 100% of, etc.
The checkbooks of the VCs were important when a Web site startup needed to spend big bucks with Sun Micro Systems, Oracle, Cisco, etc., but those days are over. Now the prices for such things are WAY down and the checkbooks of the VCs much less important.
But still, even among implementors there are frequently disagreements on the design that should be followed. And you see the same pattern. The person who wins the disagreement tends to get a lion's share of the credit for improvements, and often gets to skip blame if it fails.
If you win several of these in a row you may get offered a raise and title of architect.
At another level, I’ll admit that most founders I’ve worked for have excelled more at promoting their ideas, raising money, and hiring talent — top talent, no small feat! — than product ownership. In this case, the lieutenants who make the gears mesh and not jam are the heroes to me.
I can have five ideas before lunch with time to spate on blaming the people who will actually implement them for the past failures of my "great ideas with poor implementation"
But engineers/implementers who get into politics have a huge advantage: they can produce proofs, especially in tech. Nothing is more scary for an executive type than an engineer who refuses to be bullied into accepting the blame.
Be technically right, hunt the information that will make you correct business-wise. And you will be able to make a much stronger claim in the blame game that the guy who is just business-right.
That said, I've met quite a few implementers that seem to believe that because it's their hands on the keyboard, no other activity warrants credit, all the way down to the guy who thinks that he commands "respect" (in the gang-sense) because he can shut down the Exchange server.
It is one thing to take an idea to market when you are selling for companies like IBM, Accenture, Google, etc.
But when you have to sell the same idea on your own, that takes real skill and hard-work!