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Comment by bendotc | Hacker News Reader

"idea types"

This is why you "got laughed out of town." Why in the world, if I'm a coder-type, would I want to give even 1% of the benefit of my work to an "idea type"? There are plenty of people with great ideas and skills to make them happen, and the best part is, there's reason to believe that being the sort of person who can put execute on ideas makes you come up with better _ideas_ as well.

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While I generally agree that an idea is not worth the paper used to write it down, there is also a certain level of domain expertise that a coder will lack which an "idea person" can supply if they have the right sort of experience. You may be a rails "rock star", but if you don't know dick about the widget* supply business then your widget management app is not going to go anywhere.

*I do hate how useless wen plugins have appropriated a nice generic term...

Absolutely right. Still, I'd be wary of bringing on an "idea person" to a lean start-up if they didn't also have business contacts within the widget supply business that could be leveraged into sales, or skills to otherwise contribute to the product.

Also, I don't think it's all about coders. Depending on the business, there are lots of other day-to-day productive roles that need to be filled. But it's incredibly rare that I would describe any of them as "idea person".

I agree completely, but there are also a lot of ideas out there that need coders because coders don't have all the ideas . . . I guess the approach may be to find a place to post my idea and see if any coders think it is worth their time to join the startup.

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