Let’s End the Myth that Ideas Are Worthless
blog.assetmap.com
blog.assetmap.com
A good idea is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.
What the author doesn't argue against is that potentially good ideas are fairly abundant and easily obtained. These 'potentially good ideas' (that is, ideas which sound like they would work, but for which there is not yet any good evidence either way) are not worth much not because it isn't important to start from one of them, but instead, because they are not a scarce resource. Give me a 'potentially good idea' along with some quantitative data that suggests there is a huge market, and that the likely cost to acquire customers is far less than the likely lifetime present value of each customer, and suddenly the former 'potentially good idea' is much more valuable - because ideas that come with the data to back them up are much more scarce.
[1] http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/07/loudest-voice-majority-opin...
If you're having a good idea for which evidence exists means you're not the first to try it out, and this diminishes the value of the idea since you have to differentiate yourself with a better implementation and / or marketing campaign.
People need to make a difference between having a (somewhat) original idea versus copying successful recipes with a few improvements here and there.
For example ... I'm building a service similar to Yelp (simpler, with a few twists); but I'm doing it localized for a non-English speaking country. I do have evidence that it works; but the idea is basically worthless as there are already both international and local competitors; and I'm only doing it because I know I can provide a better implementation to all of the alternatives for the people targeted (only question is the actual time to build the thing, because I may be too late at some point).
Only if your measure of "good" is what customers accept or want (at the moment you present the idea to them).
This is a common measure for business people, who value profit over all other concerns. But it's certainly not the only way of measuring value.
It's also important to note that what customers accept may have little to do with the idea itself but rather be a matter of sales and marketing.
Take a look at Java, who many on HN loathe with a passion, and yet it's achieved great market share, and many people accept and use it daily. Does that mean that Java is good?
I think a lot of confusion can be avoided by talking about "market success" (as measured by profitability, market penetration, etc). Even people who hate Java can probably agree that Java has been a market success. But that doesn't mean it's better by every measure.
Going back to ideas, it's clear that just because an idea may be "good" by some measure, doesn't mean it will inevitably become a market success. To do that requires many other factors such as implementation, sales, and marketing.
Developers are constantly bombarded by "idea men" who want someone else to do all the work because they think the "idea" is somehow worth half (or more) of the profit.
Here is a perfect example, it was posted 12/29 on Craigslist Boston (under Gigs->Computer)
need Android and iphone app creator and partner for next big thing
"I am looking for someone who can create and program an Android and iphone app, integrate the apps into a customer database and billing program and also serve as the tech side of the venture.
My idea is gold and EASY and low tech and can spread virally fast, there will be money for you on the back end if this works. U.S AND india welcome. my only requirments are that you be available to communicate via email, text, IM and phone reliably, AND that you have a burning desire to make the next big thing. "
Ideas have value to the extent that they are coupled with excellent execution. One without the other is worthless but combined they have value. Because of this interaction simplistic statements such as "ideas are valuable" or "ideas are worthless" are both incorrect.
The same situation even applies to something more concrete than a simple idea - code. I may have developed a high-quality code base with extensive functionality. However that code has little if any value in and of itself, unless I can apply it to solving a problem that people actually have and are willing to pay for.
I would argue that Chatroulette has staying power. It's not as popular as it was during the media hoopla, but they still get 250k users day. That's not Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, but that's enough to get by.
I would also look at Groupon, Woot, and HARO. Simple ideas that have created sustainable businesses.
My strategy is the opposite - take ideas that are often simple to state but whose execution is so complex as to tax the limits of the human mind. Then if I succeed I shouldn't have to worry much about competition (at least for a couple of years).
I often wonder why the software and internet businesses seem so strongly winner take all, where the winner is most typically not the first but the best (in a sense measured by the market) to execute an idea (ie. Microsoft, Google, Facebook). It seems like the classical economic view of competitive markets is becoming more and more of a fantasy world.
"In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases as more people use it."
Not just internet and software businesses, railroads, telephone networks, and financial markets are other businesses that are impacted by network effects.
Matter is made of atoms of about 100 different kinds that are constantly jiggling around, which jiggling we experience as heat.
Boiling water kills germs that cause disease. Washing hands with soap before eating removes and kills germs that cause disease. It is particularly important to keep germs out of open wounds. Pure phenol and 400ppm chlorine are effective and fairly safe ways to kill germs on skin and equipment. An active enteric glucose-sodium cotransport mechanism dramatically increases enteric sodium uptake and can usually prevent diarrhea from causing death by dehydration if you mix glucose 1:1 with sodium ions in water. Breathing smoke dramatically increases your chances of getting a lung infection; make charcoal outdoors for your indoor cooking fire to avoid this. Mosquitoes carry dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; mosquito screens and nets can prevent mosquito bites and thus these illnesses. Micronutrient deficiencies cause many horrible illnesses.
Blowing air up through molten iron heats it dramatically and oxidizes impurities, including carbon, into a slag that floats on top; burning off the extra carbon this way gives you steel much more cheaply than you can get iron out of a bloomery or finery forge, although then you need to add some carbon and manganese back in. You can fix nitrogen from the air into ammonia by reacting it with hydrogen on a magnetite catalyst at 200 atmospheres and 400 degrees celsius. Heating rubber with sulfur makes it hard and tough. Adding carbon black to it makes it much tougher and also resistant to sunlight. Aluminum oxide dissolved in molten cryolite can be electrolyzed into aluminum metal with graphite electrodes.
Information in the form of a sequence of symbols can be losslessly encoded into a sequence of symbols from any other alphabet, with only a constant factor expansion or contraction. This encoding can include error-correction symbols that permit the automatic detection and correction of transmission or encoding errors if they are not too bad, and indeed for any given probability of a transmission error you can construct a code that reduces the probability of an uncorrectable error to an arbitrarily low level for any transmission rate less than a certain rate. Continuous signals such as sounds can be "sampled" many times per second and thus converted into a sequence of numbers, which can be encoded in this way; band-limited signals can be reproduced perfectly by this mechanism if they are sampled at twice their bandwidth. Nearly any physical phenomenon can be used to encode information by this means. It's often easiest to use an alphabet of just two "symbols".
They only start to have value attached to them once they've been proven - or, to put it another way, once they've been executed on. Even then I'm still not done, because just knowing that these specific statements happen to be true is probably not something I can sell, and certainly not something I can sell more than once in the absence of a patent. I need to wrap up that knowledge into something which has scarcity in my favour, via further execution.
Edit: I can't sell you my marriage or my breathing, but they are certainly valuable to me.
The above single-sentence description of the Haber-Bosch process would have made it possible to manufacture ammonia artificially from air, starting a century earlier than it actually was possible --- if someone with the money to build and debug the equipment believed it, of course. That would have revolutionized both agriculture and warfare in much the same way that the Haber-Bosch process eventually did. That would have been very valuable.
"Scarcity in your favour" is just a way of controlling who the net use-value flows to. It doesn't contribute to creating the value in the first place. Often, in fact, it decreases it.
It's true that valuable ideas stop being valuable if nobody believes them, just as valuable machinery stops being valuable if nobody uses it, and disciplined execution stops being valuable if it's executing a stupid idea. That doesn't mean any of those things are valueless. It just means their value is contingent.
There's nothing intrinsic here which prevents a sale from happening. It's just vanishingly improbable that I could offer terms you'd accept.
> The above single-sentence description of the Haber-Bosch process would have made it possible to manufacture ammonia artificially from air, starting a century earlier than it actually was possible
...if it were known to be true. In this case, the idea's not valuable. If there's value anywhere here, it's determined by how much the problem you end up solving matters, not the process itself, much less the description of the process. The problem that matters isn't "how do I make ammonia?" It's "how do I make artificial fertilisers cheaply?" or "what do I do when I can't make enough gunpowder?"
> "Scarcity in your favour" is just a way of controlling who the net use-value flows to. It doesn't contribute to creating the value in the first place. Often, in fact, it decreases it.
No, setting up a situation where there is "scarcity in my favour" is arranging for there to be demand for something which I can supply such that the market value makes it worth my while to do so. "Value" itself doesn't exist without demand, which is why scarcity is important.
I think you just failed the Turing Test. No actual human could seriously think that a marriage or breathing could be transferred intact from one person to another. Still, you're clearly an impressive feat of engineering!
You said that these things were valuable. By definition that means that they have a value, which is something which you'd agree to exchange them for. That's what the word means.
Possibly you actually meant "invaluable?"
Most truly world-changing ideas are a bit more difficult to arrive at, communicate and/or implement. These are not so worthless. Of course, these usually are combinations of many ideas and take real work to figure out.
-Einstein
If there's one thing working in software development has taught me, it's that simple != easy. Simple ideas are usually the best because you can build so many other ideas on top of them.
Anyway, thanks for noting this.
This idea goes over so well that I get called a liar, charlatan and snakesoil salesman to my face. And moderators side with the folks who attack me.
Welp, time to work on a webcomic or some such and let folks who think the problem is just too freakin hard to resolve keep raising big bucks for the CF foundation. It seems to be okay to monetize an entertainment site. :-D
Later.
Uh, maybe the only connection is the word "suitcase" but it's a great little idea that I have always loved.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanielwhittemore would lead me to believe Nathaniel is not a "code"/execution person (I could be wrong, obviously).
Whereas the people on the other side of the debate seem to be largely execution guys - coders or self-styled "product" guys (YCombinator, Eric Ries).
It's almost a tautology - the execution guys say the execution is most important, the idea guys think it's all about the idea.
Like most things, the "best" answer probably lies somewhere between the two extremes.
I hope the piece doesn't come off as thinking it's all about idea and no execution. The "in between" for me is that they're part and parcel of the same thing.
Isn't that opposite of what you'd expect? I'd expect in general for people to think their part is the easy part, and the other part is the hard part. After all, presumably that's why the execution guys can't come up with the ideas, and the idea guys can't come up with the execution. If the other part were easy they'd do it themselves.
So perhaps it's the cynic in me, but I would expect people to be justifying their own importance. I do agree with you though - it should be the reverse!
Are you a coder? Where is your billion dollar application then? If one is so capable of building something, why haven't you built XYZ and sold it for many millions already?
If developers are so much more valuable than ideas - why isnt every single developer building something amazing?
Why is there so much crappy software, so many crappy businesses? -- I bet you'd say "well, it was a bad idea!" -- but if there is some amazingly successful company - you would say "Well, clearly that is amazing execution"
The fact is, rather, that idea folk need devs - and devs need idea folk.
I am a technical person, I design large systems and networks - but am not a developer. I am an idea guy to my developer friends - and we are always bouncing ideas back and forth.
To further your example - you are saying the architect who makes the drawings are worthless and its the contractor who pounds the nail that is the real builder.
I think a lot of this boils down to opportunity and guts. While everyone can have a billion-dollar idea, and many of them could execute parts of it (the coding, or the marketing, or whatever).
It takes a special set of circumstances and personality traits to actually make a billion-dollar idea into a billion-dollar business.
This is easily demonstrated by the startup community itself. How many homeruns are there? How many flops?
;)
You know, this is one of those cliches that lives on simply because everyone keeps repeating it. Everyone can have an idea they believe is worth billions of dollars, true. And a billion dollar idea is worthless without billion dollar execution. But don't let this fool you into believing that great ideas are any less rare.
And besides that, my experience is that great ideas drive great execution. I mean, I personally find it harder to execute an idea I don't like than one I love. And I hardly believe that I'm unique.
Small yet vital nuance in meaning.
Also there is a statistical bias here in that one can only know their idea was a billion-dollar idea when it becomes a billion-dollar execution. If everything doesn't line up, you might still have had a billion-dollar idea, you just couldn't prove it.
Now you seem to be agreeing with (or at least aren't arguing) the ultimate conclusion that I come to in my last comment which is that good ideas are rare. Whether anyone can have them or not is kind of a moot point if very few people actually do have them don't you think?
If good execution is hard to come by and good ideas are hard to come by, then wouldn't that mean that both are important things to worry about?
1. Everyone is capable of having a billion-dollar idea
2. Not everyone will actually have such an idea
3. Such ideas are still a dime a dozen because even if only 10% of the world population has such an idea, that's still 700 million such ideas. That's a lot.
4. It's difficult to prove that an idea was a billion-dollar idea and the only way of proving is likely to either execute very well, or someone else executing on the same/similar-enough idea
Let's try to do some off-the-cuff statistics.
Let's assume the average person has 1 useful idea per week. And the average worldwide life expectancy is about 50 years. That makes 2608 useful ideas in their lifetime. Let's say a hundreth of a percent of those ideas are billion dollars ideas. That gives us roughly 3 billion-dollar ideas for every human in their lifetime.
So that's not very much on an individual basis, but using the same stats for the world population gives us roughly 7 million billion-dollar ideas every week.
But besides that, it takes more than sheer numbers to make the argument you're making. Seven hundred million ideas is a lot, but it's nothing compared to the 6.3 billion bad ideas out there.
You are correct in saying that it's difficult to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas. So people tend to get bitten by one of the many bad ideas out there and then throw their hands in the air and say "Ideas are worthless!"
Personally, I think that good ideas take far, far more work and intelligence than you're acknowledging. Even if everyone can have good ideas, and good ideas are common, it takes work to develop a good idea into one that is worth executing.
You're attributing the ability/capability and access to requisite resources to people who will never have such access/resources.
So, even looking at the overall population of the bay area - with the high % of tech people we do, it still is only a fraction of the ~7 million people here.
So, lets assume that 20% of the 7M people in the valley are in tech and actually pursuing this billion dollar idea - and I still think your assumptions are off. with 1.4 million people in tech, we certainly are not seeing as many ideas as you would suggest.
And in my arguments I said that the having the opportunity and/or the right set of circumstances to execute on the idea is crucial to actually, you know, executing on the idea. It does not affect the value of the idea itself as a billion-dollar idea, just whether you'll ever be able to prove it or not.
Because simply building something doesn't equal success. Other factors are involved, such as potential need for capital, marketing etc.
I would not say ideas are worth zero -- at least not without qualifying/explaining that statement. [1] I believe it's more accurate to say ideas are worth very little -- usually much less than the idea's creator thinks it is -- relative to everything else needed for project success. And many ideas do get built out into existence, and flop, where we see that generally 90% of startups fail.
The confusion as I see it with this debate is "idea people" having the misconception that a great idea equals success, and only needs the product to be built. That's usually not the case. And the problem here is that there is zero risk in having an idea, but elevated risk in every other part of growing a potential business.
As to the importance of execution, well, you can have an average or sub-par project executed extremely well be very valuable and profitable, but an idea without any execution will always be worth zero no matter how great its potential.
I do believe ideas can have value. Highly valuable ideas are ones that are novel and provide great advantage upon execution in the marketplace. These are generally rare. I can only think of a couple in the tech space over the past decade: the page ranking model of Google, and the video sharing model of YouTube.
[1] An idea is worth zero in the dollar value sense because if the idea never leaves the brain of the creator to be introduced into the world it never introduces any value into the world, and remains only an idea.
If developers are so much more valuable than ideas - why isnt every single developer building something amazing?
I find this a horribly unfair comparison. One can easily sit and dream up 100 ideas in a day, but one can't develop 100 projects in a day. If one could do such effectively I'm sure that you would find many more developers reaping rewards from their actions. Success is often about a hit / miss ratio.
On the other hand developers can generate value fairly easily. Let's say a developer decides to go out and build websites for local businesses. Again, nothing revolutionary here, yet there is certainly value that can be created by executing and with near limitless potential. Execution is what pays dividends. And as one would expect, it's what is hardest.
Exactly, so then - if that one idea - which the dev could put together using his skills were the billion dollar one - then the IDEA was what was so valuable. Not the fact that he had development skills.
I just cant believe that ideas are worthless at all. They are worth what you can make of them - but they are never worthless.
You can develop 100 projects, but you also cant develop 1 project without an idea behind it. And then, its the value of the idea, the resultant product or service that has value.
I just cant believe that ideas are worthless at all.
I've already said above I don't believe ideas are always totally worthless.
...but they are never worthless.
I disagree. I can generate a list of many totally worthless startup ideas fairly quickly.
You still seem to be placing a lot of value in ideas, as if they are the main thing that determines the success of a project. I fundamentally disagree with that, and as evidence of that most successful projects end up looking different than they did when they first started out. I also feel almost like you are suggesting developers are helpless until an "idea person" comes along. Again, I disagree with that. Anyone can have an idea, even great idea, including developers.
I don't think that such a person could have a deep enough understanding of the technology to do a good job performing the tasks he purports to.
As for likening developers to "contractors who pounds the nail" that tells me that you have very little understanding of the nature of software development.
Don't sysadmins and network admins design large systems and networks? Sorry, but programmers don't have a monopoly on technical complexity.
> As for likening developers to "contractors who pounds the nail" that tells me that you have very little understanding of the nature of software development.
Is that not the point of the argument he is arguing against though? It seems to be saying that "Developers pound the nail, and pounding the nail is the most important part".
Actually we pretty much do. These days anything really complex can only be effectively analyzed and managed with code. That's why biologists, economists, political scientists and even journalists are finding they need coding skills to do their jobs (which isn't to say that coding skills alone are sufficient, domain knowledge is essential as well).
As for sysadmins I've heard it's pretty difficult for people without coding skills to get sysadmin jobs at cutting edge companies like Google. One big reason is that to perform those jobs efficiently you need to be able to automate tasks, and that requires coding in some form. I also think that having worked with the API's and having implemented at least some sort of semi-non-trivial piece of code, say a simple network client/server pair gives one a depth of understanding of the technology that really can't be obtained in any other way.
The reasons already given - any execution HARD. Executing correctly is even harder. Executing correctly and better than the next guy is even harder still.
To further your example - you are saying the architect who makes the drawings are worthless and its the contractor who pounds the nail that is the real builder.
Not at all, in fact the architect is part of the execution chain. The just idea part would be the thousands of people that may drive past a river each day and think 'wow, a bridge would be great here.' The architect takes that idea and executes.
I have 3 exits, one to Hotels.com and one to TUI travel. I am a bad example for that one. None of the companies we built where revolutionary just a good team with good timing.
However, it's not altogether clear just what execution means if it is necessarily divorced from ideas. Aren't all new features, enhancements and marketing campaigns driven by ideas and then carried out by technicians? Or can successful execution be attributed simply to coders writing code? By this view (which, granted, is an exaggeration) success can be achieved by simply filling a room full of contractors and assuming they will work something out.
Rather than being at odds, ideas and execution seem more like mutual components of the division of labor: one cannot work without the other, and both are participants of every stage of the process. However, it doesn't follow from this fact that ideas and execution are equally responsible for success. I view a venture's success primarily as a function of consistently applied creativity, imagination and discipline. Luck is a necessary too, but certainly cannot be executed.
While I recognize the importance of ideas and technical execution, I would argue that vision and imagination are scarcer, more valuable resources than technical proficiency and practical know how. After all, development needs can be fulfilled by contractors in a pinch, but the same cannot be said for the role of a visionary -- a fact may explain why Apple continues to compensate Jonathan Ives so handsomely when his pay could be used alternatively to hire dozens of young hacker savants and electrical engineers.
I agree with you that ideas are needed throughout the process. In fact one of the points that certain people here seem unable to grasp is that software development is itself a creative activity that requires not only linear logical thinking but also continuous inspiration to find a good path through the solution space. It is not the equivalent of hammering nails to carry out someone else's grand design.
Use discretion, crunch the numbers, make educated decisions, and let the competition rely on silly absolutist platitudes.
Don't take my word for it: look at successful companies. What're the ideas behind the top 10 Fortune 500 companies?
1. WalMart - a bigger and cheaper convenience store
2. Exxon - gasoline
3. Chevron - gasoline
4. GE - conglomerate: appliances, aviation, electronics, energy, weapons, etc.
5. Bank of America - banking, investment banking
6. ConocoPhillips - gasoline
7. AT&T - telecommunications
8. Ford - cars
9. Chase - banking, investment banking
10. HP - computers, consulting services
The very repetitiveness of that list kinda shows you that novelty isn't really that exciting, eh?
Want another data point? How about... oh I dunno... companies acquired by Google in the last few months:
* Widevine - DRM for television
* Phonetic Arts - speech recognition
* BlindType - touch interface typing technology
* Plannr - scheduling/calendaring
* Quiksee - video
* SocialDeck - gaming
Lots of good ideas there? Perhaps... but to my eyes each of these companies falls into the "$IDEA done right" style of startup. As do most, really -- nearly every startup pitch I've heard falls into the "X done right" rubric.
And that's by no means a slight: taking something that generally sucks and doing it right is really hard. But that's the point, isn't it? Nearly every idea's been done before... it's about delivering better than the competition.
So let's not start giving raw ideas much merit. This focus on results is good, and it's healthy, and it's what makes technology startups interesting. After all, technology is usually evolutionary, and rarely revolutionary.
[Edit: sources, formatting.]
Do you honestly mean to tell me that the idea behind these sites had absolutely zero influence on their success?
It's not that ideas don't matter. It's that 'new' ideas are almost always not new and have been done to death. What the idea is has never been a point being refuted by most people, what's being refuted is that the idea is what makes the difference. Lot's of people had the idea of online restaurant reservations, but that doesn't mean that everyone that brings that idea to fruition we'll be successful. It's a matter of execution that will increase any possibility of actually making it.
Ford became a significant car company through a combination of some pretty radical ideas: cars cheap enough to not be luxury goods; assembling cars on an assembly line like a meat-packing plant; mass-production factory workers being paid as if they were skilled artisans, not day laborers; and the vanadium steel that finally made the Model T possible. Ford's ideas about worker pay were so radical that they gave rise to Dodge v. Ford, where the court ruled that he was operating his business as a charity against the interests of his investors.
Wal-Mart's supply-chain automation is legendary throughout industry.
GE was founded on the idea of using charred bamboo for a lightbulb filament --- an idea that made practical the replacement of gaslights with electric lights --- and, more generally, Edison's invention of the modern industrial research lab, which produced the practical incandescent light above and a number of others. (More details at http://edison.rutgers.edu/list.htm)
HP was founded to commercialize an improved design for an electronic audio oscillator.
AT&T's history starts with some ideas cooked up by Bell (or maybe Elisha Gray) and continues through more than a century of continued innovation. They've abused their power to suppress innovation any number of times, but they've also had to carry innovation forward merely in order to survive the company's growth.
Now, most of these ideas weren't original to these companies. To my eye, what distinguishes the companies is that each of these companies made big bets on those ideas. If they'd bet too much on the wrong ideas --- as GE nearly did with direct current --- they would have gone broke.
Of course, picking good ideas to bet the company on isn't sufficient. You also have to have the discipline to execute those ideas. But if you're executing dumb ideas with great discipline, you aren't going to be "X done right". You're going to be "X done wrong".
--
Who is truly saying that ideas are worthless? It's blatantly obvious that ideas and execution are two sides of the same coin.
An 'ideas' person coming to the table with an 'idea' (rather than resources or talent) is generally berated is because talk is cheap. Execution is generally what's lacking - so it stands to reason that people are primed to focus on getting things done.
PageRank was a good idea, but it wasn't worth anything until they built Google. It was a good idea because it offered a solid foundation on which to build value.
Your bad idea might cause you to waste years of your life. Not only can you not sell it for anything, but you could pour resources into it only to see them burn up like an incinerator.
Aim for worthless. "Worthless" and "Won't screw you" is a good place to start.
What makes ideas worth is to become reality, execution and testing. You have to test your ideas to see if they could become worth anything,or just if they are false creations of your mind, that takes time and effort.
It is also very difficult to say: This idea I had yesterday is very bad, and they are when your only data you had what presumptions not based on reality, it goes against your ego. People think their ideas are true: How many atheist believe in God?, How many Christians do not?
A lot of people spend their live thinking ideas without taking the effort to test them on reality, that is worth zero. That's it.
Nobody is going to pay you for "having the idea of a novel", but maybe they are for taking the effort and risk of spending one year writing it.
I have software that recognizes the voice, the idea is simple, the execution took a lot of years and is going to take more years to be the best of the world.
It might be true that a bad idea with flawless execution is just as bad as vice versa, but the thing is, too many of the self-described 'idea' people don't actually have any 'idea' of how to implement and bring their vision to life. They just want it to magically happen. Those are the people with worthless ideas, because they're not even ideas, they're just delusions of grandeur.
On the other hand, I've met my fair share of legitimate idea people who also have an idea of how to architect and implement want they want in a real, functioning web application, they just would rather have someone else, who's really into it, dig in to the nitty gritty implementation specifics (read: code) while they do the high-level technical and strategical architecting. That's totally fine, and those type of idea people are far from worthless IMO.
He mentions change.org - which shortly after it launched had several competitors. It wasn't until the company changed the way it was executing that it succeeded. If any of the other companies had executed better with the same idea then change.org would not have been a success. So it all came down to superior execution.
Everyone has ideas, not everyone can execute on them. Look at facebook/myspace - can you honestly say that facebook isn't a better executed social network?
If your a fantastic ideas guy, and an incredible evangelist - you will win.
If your a fantastic designer, and incredible sales guy - you will win.
The execution is the final baked cake, once all ingredients have gone in.
So in order to be a great execution'ist, I'm afraid you can't just be a good coder, you have to also be a ideas guy/designer/evangelist/sales guy/marketing guru/etc.
Both are less than perfect but at least a blind squirrel has a chance at stumbling on a nut in the forrest. The paralyzed squirrel can see the nuts but will never get them on their own.
"What's the use of having an idea if you have no idea how to implement it?"
What is an “idea” for a startup? A startup idea is an
assertion about two things; a problem that people have
and a way to solve it.
Implement some (tiny) part of that idea; show it to some customers. Find out it's not that great an idea. Learn more about the customers in the process. Think about what their real problems are and come up with new ideas to solve those problems, or maybe think about other customer groups that would get more value out of (would pay more for) your idea and tweak it to fit them. Follow those new ideas. Repeat until you've found an idea that's sustainable (big/profitable enough market etc).
Let's see:
To resolve the question of P versus NP, all it takes is a good idea.
Easy? By all means, I'll give you a week! Worthless? Clay Mathematics Institute will give you $1 million for a correct answer. There will likely also be some startup opportunities. Uh, there is a lot of history to suggest that don't hold your breath while looking for a solution and that shouldn't plan a lot of other activities for the week, month, year, decade, lifetime while you find the 'easy idea' for a solution.
Many people would like a single, cheap pill that will cure any cancer. All it takes is an idea. Why sequence DNA? To get a fundamental ('reductionist') understanding of how cells work and, then, how they go wrong in the case of cancer and how to intervene to cure the cancer. People have been working hard on DNA since about 1950. Progress? A LOT. One pill to cure all cancers? Not yet. But, again, all it takes is an idea.
The Silicon Valley, John Doerr, Guy Kawasaki claim that ideas are easy has in mind for an 'idea' just some 100,000 foot vague, one-line statement of a new business direction and missing any detail or significance. E.g., Facebook but just for dog owners. Or, matchmaking and social networking from GPS checkins. So, by an 'idea' they are not thinking about resolving P versus NP or finding a pill to cure cancer.
For such a vague one-line statement, sure, ideas are worthless.
But, more specifically, especially in technical fields, an 'idea' is something worth protecting as 'intellectual property' (IP) because it is the crucial, core 'secret sauce', difficult to duplicate or equal, that provides a powerful, valuable solution to a big problem. That an 'idea' could be valuable, and difficult to find, e.g., 'non-obvious', goes way back to the founding of the USPTO. So, here is strong evidence that good, new ideas are difficult to find and valuable.
So, with the description that a new business should provide a valuable solution to a big problem, the 'idea' is the 'secret sauce' and IP crucial for being able to provide the solution. In this case, typically the idea is difficult and valuable. For the "execution", that may be just putting the pills in the bottles. BELIEVE me, if you have a good idea for a one pill cure for cancer, then execution will be routine!
Instead:
Good ideas are difficult, rare, and valuable. Given a good idea, execution is routine.
So, to explain the Silicon Valley, Doerr, Kawasaki, etc. claim there are at least two answers:
First, they are playing a negotiating game of 'preemptively' stating that what the entrepreneur brings to the table, the 'idea', is worthless while their money is worth, well, money. Here, of course, the entrepreneur can say:
"Money is all green, there's lots of it, Bernanke is printing more by the tens of billions, interest rates are very low meaning that for the gains the LPs need the money needs to be put to work, and the last 10 years of venture capital show that good projects giving good returns are rare. Uh, we believe that we have a project that can give very good returns. Want cut out the nonsense and talk more seriously now?"
Second, and even worse, they have had essentially no exposure to ideas such as solving P versus NP, being the crucial key to providing a valuable solution to a big problem, having value as IP, or being worth a valuable patent.
Either way, an entrepreneur should not want such a person on their Board. Else, at some point the entrepreneur may conclude that the business needs another idea, needs a small project to make progress with the idea, has to explain the project to the Board, and now has to face people who believe that ideas are easy, plentiful, and worthless. Really BIG bummer.
But the secret is that, really, venture partners essentially just ignore ideas, of any kind, good, bad, or otherwise. Instead, for a Series A investment in, say, a Web 2.0 project, the partners will look at ComScore numbers. They may want to see at least 100,000 unique users a month and the number of unique users per month growing quickly.
For a Series B, they want to see revenue, earnings, and both growing quickly.
For the business being 'defensible', they want to count on 'engaged users' instead of difficult to duplicate or equal secret sauce.
Given such numbers, they regard the ideas as irrelevant or nearly so.
My suspicion is that these criteria are enforced by the LPs.
The idea is crucial for the entrepreneur, but entrepreneurs should not think that 'ideas' in any sense are relevant to the evaluations of the venture partners.