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Comment by jmpeters | Hacker News Reader

Ideas are overrated. Execution matters far more. GrandCentral is very similar to a company called ThinkLink which preceded it by about five years. Facebook coopted ConnectU's ideas. The history of high technology is replete with similar examples. Yet GrandCentral and Facebook deserve their success. They weren't the most innovative in their respective spaces, but they executed best. That's what counts.

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Agree. Far more interesting question is what ideas you've implemented and why they failed. (but please, be more creative than "no one really wanted it")

Depends greatly on your definition of "idea."

For me, an idea is very thorough and well thought out. The execution is then trivial, except for publicity and other stuff that's really hard to control.

Ideas are far from worthless. I'll give anyone $2000 right now for a good idea that investors like enough to get me out of this near debt I'm struggling through.

Most investors don't fund ideas.

Well, I guess I'm set then since we have everything but.

Could have fooled me, but what do I know. I swore off investors for a while last year after my partner quit and things were looking bad.

But you've another problem: you're looking at investors to get you out of debt and that's another thing they don't do;)

I said:

1. I'm not in debt.

2. I'm not looking for investors.

Investors don't fund people from what I've seen. Most fund based on the past experience of the people, how much they like them, how well they can pitch themselves. But investors rarely actually fund based on the people.

I totally agree with you. However, "coopted" might be portraying it in a slightly differetn light than is warranted. There is a difference between being better at execution and walking away with the code that was being used to implement one idea, and implementing it yourself.

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