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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny how many people think their ideas are truly brilliant and warrant a massive amount of respect.

Anyone who’s worked as an engineer for awhile knows that ideas are a dime a dozen, they are rarely unique, and are about a millionth of what needs to be done to succeed

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What is needed in your opinion?

EDIT: I say this as an engineer who is putting his notice in tomorrow to found a startup

EDIT EDIT: Thanks guy, this is along the lines I'm thinking. I'll be competing with companies like Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp. I worked in a consulting environment for two years and these tools could never be adopted despite the org size growing to 1000+ people in my larger team. It was a big pain point and I think I've built a solution that will help big time.

Demonstrate traction. The idea person should have at least an audience for the problem space. If not, they are Field of Dreams - build it and they will come. That doesn't work.

> Field of Dreams

This movie probably caused double or triple digit millions of wasted investments by small business owners when it put the wrong idea in to their head.

Solid advice. Too many people think build it and sell it. When if you did a few interviews and market research you’d realize it might be a flop.

Ability to execute. That normally means build, take to market, measure, adjust, repeat.

A good biz guy can be worth his weight in gold. It's harder than people think to get it right: to figure out the right markets to address first and how to tweak/target your product to do so, when, how, and from whom to raise capital, at what rate to expand the team, sales and marketing stuff, etc. Doubly so if the technical co-founder isn't as good at these. It's not worth 80% of equity against 20%, but it is worth a reasonably fair share.

Agreed. The tough thing, though, is that it's (generally) a lot easier to spot a bad engineer than a bs "ideas guy".

Not for a business guy it’s not. Both sides have a hard time evaluating each other.

For an engineer, sure. But for a business guy, it might be a bit tricky. Though I'd say a good business guy probably has a bunch of engineering contacts.

It behooves everyone to be able to spot a narcissist, and that eliminates a huge swath of bad "idea guys" and bad MBAs.

You didn't ask me, and I don't have a complete answer, but here's a starting point. Consider what's required for a patent: Novelty, usefulness, and reduction to practice. The latter step often changes the first two, for instance by uncovering problems, or even improving the overall quality of the idea.

Of course a lot of things need to right, beyond that point. I use the patent rule as a guide to make sure that the right people get credit where credit is due, when an idea reaches the market successfully.

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