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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

Of course ideas aren't worthless.

The reason this meme became popular here is that the audience to Hacker News is predominately developers, and many are sick of people that don't value the ability to execute and try to negotiate as if the developer would be lucky to join them.

Business = Marketing + Advertising + Sales + Idea + Implementation + Finance

Even this is too simple though. However, my point is that business isn't just about "execution" of an idea into a product...

The most important thing is working in skilled, multi-discipline teams where people will support each others weak areas.

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>> many are sick of people that don't value the ability to execute

>> business isn't just about "execution" of an idea into a product

The ability to execute is not limited to engineering. It's also applicable to the business side (ability to successfully secure funding, find product market fit, create a marketing and pricing strategy that works, etc).

The other thing is that you cannot neatly separate ideas and execution. As you break a high level problem into its components, there are ideas at every lower level that will allow you to succeed. A high level idea cannot succeed without the supporting lower level ideas (strategies and tactics) in a variety of disciplines (marketing, product, engineering, etc). If we take Facebook as an example: many people at several universities had the broad idea, but only one set of people also had the lower level strategies and tactics to turn that idea into a multi-billion dollar company.

My take on this: good high level ideas are worthless without the appropriate low level supporting ideas.

you cannot neatly separate ideas and execution.

This. ^^^ Its all about the performance envelope. And who actually knows it.

Ideas are both general "ideas" (a product, or about a theory, or strategy) as well as "ideas" are about problem solving (practical, tactical, etc). A top "technical" guy in any field will be an idea guy, strictly because he is a problem solver that can abstract his experience back into higher-level principles.

Example: Programming requires creative problem solving. Likewise, you'd be amazed at how much "creativity" happens in accounting, tax, and legal professions. ALthough much of this is of the practical variety ("artisanal") rather than of the blue sky ("arty").

LIkewise, a top "Idea" guy in any field with have both levels of abstraction covered. I think somebody once made the remark that if you dream it but can't ship it, its more like a hallucination than an actual idea. So maybe the bad ones are not the "idea guys" but "the hallucinators". And in that case, yes, their value is certainly questionable. =D

See, I think instead of +, those should be *, and all values should be in the range [0-1]

Right, unless you measure everything on a log-scale.

And I am only half-joking. It is actually quite natural to think in log=terms. Just think how questionnaires have a size of organization, for example, as a multiple choice between 1-10, 10-100, 100-1000, 1000-10000, more than 10000.

>Business = Marketing + Advertising + Sales + Idea + Implementation + Finance

I'd say Business = Marketing * Advertising * Sales * Idea * Implementation * Finance

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