Ideas are Worthless, Execution is Priceless | Hacker News Reader

Ideas are Worthless, Execution is Priceless

bauerfive.com

14 pointsd_c16 comments

Ideas are not worthless, ideas are the foundation of everything. The problem with this post, and indeed of many of the Hacker News acolytes, is the mistaken belief that "worth" is only measured in dollars. This is a narrow-hearted and ignorant attitude certain to end in misery. Can you say "GFC"? Ideas without good execution are NOT worthless. Execution without a good idea is a distraction from life, and unfortunately many in the "startup" game are terminally distracted, resulting in an endless stream of tech-based companies that trot out unimaginative versions of a half-baked idea vaguely related to "web community" or "crowd sourcing", but measured only in terms of "worth" as it relates to (imaginary) money. These execution-without-idea projects are completely unconcerned with the real meaning of "worth", ie, that which contributes meaningfully to the growth of love and compassion.

I disagree with the title. Not all ideas are good ideas, so having an idea that is worth executing is certianly not worthless.

Obviously, if you dont execute it then it becomes worthless.

The headline makes me revisit http://sivers.org/multiply.

Execution is in (almost) all cases the hard part of the equation.

If ideas had more intrinsic value, there'd probably be a market for ideas. But really there is none. Almost no one is willing to pay you for an idea.

The closest we come to such a market is the patent market. But again here, it is virtually never the case that a company buys another company to actually implement its ideas. When was the last time you heard that a patent troll was bought in order to create a product? Never (or rarely).

I disagree. I don't consider "ideas" to be elevator pitches about projects. I consider "ideas" to be fundamental insights about markets or software or technology, and there is a huge market for this, whether that's consulting or a product business or a hybrid.

Just because people don't get paid to glibly shoot their mouthes off (usually), doesn't mean there is no meaningful market for ideas.

People I know in consulting don't get paid for their ideas. They get paid for their results and their experience in tackling certain types of problems.

Fundamentally, the ideas don't stand on their own. Their backed by a name institution that delivers results on the ideas.

Ideas are nice, but they're a dime a dozen.

think tanks.

Having worked at a think tank, think tanks don't get paid for their ideas. At least not in the way we're discussing them. They get paid for doing research and folding this reseach into policy.

Let me put it another way. The recommendations that a think tank comes up with isn't worth the paper it's printed on without the weeks/months of backup research that shows how the recommendations came about. That's what is being paid for, not the idea/recommendation.

But that's what we're talking about here, I believe. As with anything, there are both good and bad ideas. Think tanks are paid to come up with good ideas; since ideas are a market for lemons (asymmetric information about their worth), the thinktank then signals that the ideas are good by providing accompanying research. The thinktank could just tell you their ideas and keep the research to themselves, but you probably wouldn't believe them.

Now, since 90% of the output of all cretative processes is crap, and that includes ideas; and since ideas experience network effects where the best ideas will gain supporters who will exponentially increase the "execution" multiplier for the idea, while the long tail of ideas will never get executed on at all; it becomes pretty obvious that the median idea won't have any market value whatsoever. Talking about "ideas" as if they all had the same worth will then lead you to believe that, since the median idea isn't worth much, no idea can be.

But the think tanks don't get paid for their ideas. And frankly think tanks are a bad example, since they really generate original ideas per se. But usually offer recommendations that are within the realm of what is commonly known in the field, but what's not clear is what is the best solution, e.g., what's the best way to do spectrum auctions.

So in these examples there's usually a handful of ways to handle it. Think tanks will often build models, go through the literature, and recommend a way of doing it. The value isn't in just the recommendation. You can find five other think tanks that will point to five other ways of doing it. The value is in their research.

To bring it back to HN. Here's an idea I have. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to teleport from point A to point B? How much do you want to pay me for the idea? Probably not much. But what if I had done a whole bunch of research in physics that gave a foundation for how it could be done, and built a device that could teleport a particle from A to a random location (so not location B). All of sudden the "idea" looks like it might be worth something. But you're really not buying the idea. You're buying all of the work that comes after the idea. It's not a bad idea, but it's not worth much without a whole lot of work.

This statement is becoming incredibly cliche. Ideas are not sufficient but they are necessary. There are many well executed but fundamentally worthless products. I find most startups mentioned on hacker news well executed but I often just can't get excited by them because the underlying idea is so uninteresting and trivial. It's actually a sad waste of talent.

A nice take on the subject : http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_value_of_ideas/

Ideas are plenty valuable, some of them very much so (e.g. "germs cause disease"). But ideas without good execution are worthless. And teams who execute well tend to avoid being shackled to bad ideas, they'll transform them to good ideas along the way.

The egg is worthless, the chicken is priceless.

You need both. One is the beginnging of the road, the other is the end. Many things happen in between. Let's not see the world so black and white please.

Deleted comment

[The parent deleted his post, but it said "Are we done talking about this yet?"]

No. I'll bet that everyday a new aspiring entrepreneur comes to HN to learn more. If just one of these aspiring entrepreneurs learns something new such as "Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything" then I think it's worth sharing. As an added bonus, the author has added his own story related to the axiom. That in of itself is worth reading, especially for the more experienced.

These will never get old.

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