If you're going to talk of great companies, you can't leave out the two juggernauts of our time.

Neither Google nor Facebook started as a company.

Both search and social networks were written off as markets when the two current leaders entered the space.

I don't want to invoke another semantic wrestling championship between execution and ideas, but you have to give credit to Facebook for realising that social networks are not just about dating. It was their idea of exactly replicating offline social relationships on the web, executed to near perfection that made them successful. Great ideas are a combination of many small seemingly trivial good ideas. They do matter, otherwise one wouldn't know what to execute.

I'm afraid this article does rather poorly on the swombat-o-meter - http://swombat.com/2011/1/20/how-to-write-good-startup-advic...