Comment by random_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by random_user | Hacker News Reader

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> Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution that matters.

And you are right. And if I had done absolutely nothing in my life. If I was a kid either dropping out of school or just out of school your sermon would be well applied. I'm not.

After over thirty years of entrepreneurship I tend to use "idea" to really mean "opportunity". Most ideas are utterly worthless. They are great as thinking tools. Never stop generating ideas! A few ideas are worth millions, o billions. Instagram started as an idea. Of course, that idea happened thousands of times. One team executed it well and at the right time.

What this means is that ideas are not always obvious identifications of market opportunities. To over-use Instagram, I know I would have thought that was a stupid idea. I wouldn't have given the Instagram idea the time of day. I would have discounted it as useless and moved on. So, here's an idea, worth billions when matched with the right team, timing and execution, that most people would think was just plain stupid.

As I got older I've tried to be less critical of ideas. I listen to them and I log mine assiduously. I allow myself to generate and consider ideas that, on first inspection, seem utterly ridiculous. I try to review them from time to time. What happens is that sometimes two or three combine into one. That's the case of the quadcopter opportunity I have uncovered. It's the combination of a number of thoughts and an interest in a couple of market segments I've had for years, decades, possibly. Now it's just about execution.

Still, inspired by your comment I edited my post and replaced "idea" with "opportunity". That's what I am talking about, opportunities, not ideas. I have hundreds of ideas, the vast majority of which are not opportunities.

Thanks.

The problem isn't the word "idea". It's the fact that you haven't gotten past the part that's in your head. You can't be sure that an idea is an opportunities until you've put them out there and seen if you can get them any traction.

With respect, I think you are drinking too much of the cool-aid. Yes, in general terms you are right. The difference is that if you have thirty years of entrepreneurship under your belt, having tried, failed and succeeded you should develop a good sense of the good, the bad and the ugly. I am not coming here as an idealist who's never done a thing to proclaim I can save the world.

No. I have logged somewhere in the range of 500 ideas over the last three years. Most are not what I would consider to be opportunities. And that's the way it usually goes. I am fairly certain there are a few that are very interesting and, yes, they are true opportunities waiting for funding and execution. One of them is based on years of using similar services in the context of running my own business and then realizing there's an interesting approach that could do very well. The other, as I said in another comment, is one that's the result of constantly thinking and being involved in one way or another in a couple of market segments and finally having "seen the light" that connects the two worlds. The markets are there for the taking. It's all about funding and execution.

>With respect, I think you are drinking too much of the cool-aid.

With respect, anyone that has ever said "its not an idea, its an opportunity" shouldn't be accusing others of "drinking too much of the cool aid."

I wish you luck, but I think you will find it difficult to attract attention when you have given virtually no information at all about either of your ideas. Then again, I'm not a VC so what do I know?

Anyone serious enough wanting to have a conversation about what I've got on the table can easily contact me off-list and have detailed discussions. I've already had a number of them with people who reached out.

I understand you might want to see more info exposed publicly. Sorry. Not going to happen. I suppose you might not understand this until you experience what it is like to be open and have a good opportunity taken away from you by a competitor. Having lived that wonderful experience I chose to conduct things using a different approach.

I don't see why your opportunities are any better than ideas, aren't they just your really good ideas? The opportunity is surely for you to execute it now, because to everyone else it's just a really good idea?

No. An opportunity is an idea connected to a market need.

There's more than one way to connect an idea to a market need.

One case is where the market already exists either entirely or to some degree and you have a solid idea of how to make it better: iPhone.

Another is where you are the target market yourself and know the market very well. You see the need. You see the pain points and you are equipped to address them. I could argue that might have been the start of Hewlett and Packard.

FedEx is a case of an idea that was discounted and then proven to have been right on the mark. Some ideas can't be tested with $15,000 over a summer.

There are other cases where the idea and the market opportunity reveal themselves during some kind of an instant or event that provides the necessary clarity, if you will, that connects the two. A friend of mine and I had the idea for what eventually became LoJack a year or two before that company came out with their product. We were young, making very good money at our respective jobs and simply didn't have enough of that "clarity" (for lack of a better word) to take the idea seriously. To this day we laugh about it.

Ideas that are just ideas with no connection to a market happen at least two ways.

One is the case of a well established or entrenched set of players against which it'd be almost impossible to compete. It'd be hard to go up against Google or Facebook. The insight an idea would have to have in order to connect with a market opportunity in search or social would have to be so incredible that people would literally want to throw money at you. Even with that, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to even begin to have a shot at that. For all intents and purposes you can say that ideas in social or search really don't have a market because you really can't get that market.

The other category are ideas that really don't have markets, at least in the context of what makes for a good scalable company. Local restaurants. Great idea if you want to work 20 hours a day seven days a week, have huge risk of failure, no real scalability and no prospects of any kind of an exit that makes sense. For some people that would be a market. If it weren't there would be no mom-and-pop local restaurants. For most ventures that are looking for or need scale in order to be considered successful a mom-and-pop restaurant idea is an idea without a market.

I could go on. There are, of course, ideas that really lead to nothing useful. Most of those are obvious to most except for the guy married to the idea.

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