I'm not totally sure this is really written for the HN audience, but since its self-submitted I'm going to speak my mind.

Everyone with any chops in silicon valley already knows this. It's established conventional wisdom at this point. Yes, there are still a lot of people who need to hear it (I sit next to them on airplanes sometimes), but around here this is preaching to the choir in the most fundamental sense. Furthermore, debating the nuance of such a proclamation is masturbatory. Yes reality is nuanced, you can always find a counter-example, but frankly an intellectual understanding of the relative importance of "ideas" (whatever that really means in a knowledge economy) is probably one of the most useless forms of wisdom you can aspire to as an entrepreneur.