If Execution Is What Matters, Where Does That Leave Ideas?
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It all depends on the idea: some are just so much better than others...
Larry and Sergey's PageRank isn't a new application level idea (as search engines already existed) but rather a better implementation of an existing application level idea.
Perhaps you could say that twitter is an accidental success that is much more interesting than the original vision.
"@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded. Back then, we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message."
http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born...
1) idea: A mental model of the way something works, has worked, or could work in the future. (e.g. page rank)
2) idea: A plan. (e.g. Twitter sponsoring SxSw)
(I realize the two senses of the word are related, but for our purposes they are functionally distinct.)
Anyway, good ideas of both types can create value, but they do so in completely different ways and require completely different resources, strategies, and tactics to execute.
In any case the entire concept of starting a business around an idea is stupid to begin with. Twitter and Google aren't the result of a good idea, they're the result of thousands of good ideas, a sufficient quantity of which were executed well enough to keep the lights on. Real business people don't start with a business idea, they start with an asset they want to capture, and then come up with several dozen ideas for capturing that asset and then pick the best ones to push through the dip.
Perhaps a stupid question: what do you mean by asset in this case?
An asset is a resource that you create which you can later harvest for money. For example, let's say you are an event promoter. In this case your asset is your mailing list, because having a list of 300k people willing to read about your events allows you to go to night clubs and ask for $20k in exchange for sending out a blast to your followers.
So once you decide that the asset you are creating is the list of people willing to hear about your events, there are any number of ways you can go about creating this list. You can sign people up who go to events, run contests, find local people on twitter and start conversations with them, create a website and run google ads to get people to it, etc.
The point is that smart entrepreneurs don't start with ideas, because ideas usually fail and once they fail you're fucked. Rather, they come up with an asset they know is valuable, and then come up with 50 ways to build that asset, knowing that some of them will fail. This way even if some of your ideas are only hit 10% of your target goal for growing the asset, at least you spent that time growing an asset that you can monetize in the future and you don't have to start all over.
Business ideas are for chumps.
Did I just restate and reword the obvious? Did I execute? Eh.
The "idea" is often left in the dust many times over as the business morph into something that the market likes, and those ideas can come from anywhere -- a person explaining it, an unrelated sign, a moment of frustration, whatever.
That spark is like a drop in the ocean of execution. It's almost, but not quite worthless. It's worth a pat on the back, nothing else.
Also, at least as important as the idea itself, is the ability to recognize a good idea. Most people who try have plenty of ideas, and most of these ideas just aren't that good.
Companies want you to implement things based on ideas that are not your own. So it is in their self-interest to tell you that ideas are not important.
A university education is all about teaching students to implement stuff because: (1) this is what companies want; and (2) it is easier to do so than to try to get students to come up with compelling ideas.
Finally, VCs fund very small companies and it makes sense for them to worry about whether a small team is capable of great execution. No matter how good the founders' idea, VCs don't want to lose on their investments.
In my career in computers, I have come across people with great ideas a few times, who have done nothing with that idea (primarily because they wouldn't leave their safe jobs), only to see it become insanely successful when someone else, who had the same idea independently, executed on it. So the idea obviously had value, but only because the potential was realized with the execution.
Also, your comment smacks of wanting to bitch about something because this is a TechCrunch story...did you even read it? The article is about the backstory of Tweetmeme and the bigger question of compensation for someone who was involved in the early idea of a startup, but wasn't there for the execution and risk-taking that came later.
And no, I read the headline and skimmed the article.
That may be because genuinely new ideas are hard to come by today. There is also a lot of risk associated with them. Execution, although it has its pitfalls, largely depends on timing and effort.