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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

I think this reinforces the notion that ideas are fairly cheap; it's execution that matters.

Looks like timing was the issue with the companies listed, Many times ideas are sound, execution is solid but the audience just isn't ready for the actual product in the current landscape.

Well, for a lot of them, execution was crap too.

Shipping 50lb bags of dog food at pets.com for free is still a bad idea.

"Shipping for free" is a slippery concept, since it just means that the cost of shipping has been moved out of a line item called "shipping" into another one. But there are certainly people making money today shipping big bags of dog food for not much money. Amazon alone is full of them, to say nothing of these new retailers starting up. (I'm curious what they expect to offer me over Amazon, but that's a question for another article, I suppose.) It doesn't seem to me it was a "bad idea" so much as "one whose time had not come yet". Pets.com couldn't afford to set up Amazon-scale infrastructure for mere pet food, but now, Amazon-scale infrastructure exists. Even if these new businesses go under, the idea is frankly already proved to some extent, since people are already doing it, and I wouldn't expect them to stop.

Amazon also is clearly no making profit doing what they are doing either. They can afford it due to the vast scale but for how long?

Seems to work for me, not from pets.com specifically though. We have all our pet food on automatic ship.

Both matter. Execution doesn't progress without the capacity to think well. Learning to think well doesn't progress without littering and clearing the mind of thousands of ideas. It's a careful balance of maintaining a signal in the noise.

I agree to some extent. I think that given an equal idea across two executions, the better execution wins. And that's the take away.

Given an equal execution across two different ideas, wouldn't the better idea win?

A less-valuable (worse) idea may be easier to execute successfully than a more valuable (better) idea.

Or not.

But, going with that: Conversely, a better execution may be more difficult to implement successfully.

My original point was that the G-GP's statement was self-evident to the point of meaninglessness. You could flip the bits the other way and say something equally as meaning-ful(less).

Both idea and execution have some level of importance, but holding one constant while improving the other does nothing to discriminate between the relative value of either.

The completion of executing the less valuable (as perceived) idea may lead to the ease in execution of the more valuable (as perceived) idea.

It's more humorous to consider maths and programs as ideas. And when I say humorous, I mean that very seriously.

Too many variables.

It's also the timing of ideas. Many of these ideas flopped because execution just wasn't feasible at the time. Today, it's much cheaper to execute on ideas (people are moderately more expensive, technology infrastructure is several orders of magnitude less) so ideas that didn't pass muster previously now might.

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