Ask HN: The value of ideas

If you take a look at successful companies you'll find that the ideas behind them are in no way unique, and more often than not they're not based on an idea but on a market. Here are the ten most profitable companies in the Forbes 1000 list and what they do:<p>ExxonMobil - Oil &#38; Gas Operations<p>Gazprom Russia - Oil &#38; Gas Operations<p>Royal Dutch Shell - Oil &#38; Gas Operations<p>Chevron - Oil &#38; Gas Operations<p>BP - Oil &#38; Gas Operations<p>PetroChina - Oil &#38; Gas Operations<p>General Electric - Conglomerates<p>Microsoft - Software &#38; Services<p>Toyota Motor - Consumer Durables<p>Nestlé - Food, Drink &#38; Tobacco<p>Only General Electric and Microsoft seem to be based on an idea, the others adress a market and create a product to fit that market. And it can be argued whether these are successes because of the idea - Edison tried thousands of different configurations before he actually invented the lightbulb, and Microsoft bought their first hit-product DOS from Tim Paterson and became successful by selling it, not inventing it. Execution apperas to have been paramount in their success.<p>These examples aren't unique. Even Google, often touted as the canonical "idea" company couldn't sell their technology, even though they tried. They only created Google after futile attempts at selling the idea to among others Yahoo.

Let's play a thought experiment:<p>I'm Paul Graham, and I've got a fantastic, knock-your-socks-off idea for a business. How much will you pay me for it?<p>OR<p>I'm Travis. I've got a mediocre idea, but have spent a lot of time learning about my customers and market. I've built a kickass piece of software that solves the pain. But, again, my idea isn't that great (think Craigslist: the idea of online classifieds isn't exactly a great one, or a novel/clever one...) Will you pay me more for this?

Ideas matter, but not that much. We'd all rather have good ideas than bad ideas, which proves theres some value in the idea itself.<p>But <i>GREAT ideas</i> usually come from some form of execution and iteration. Great ideas just don't come from sitting and brainstorming what to build your startup into. Using your comparison of Google's pagerank, PageRank wasn't drummed up and perfected as an idea before it was executed. Sergey and Larry probably had a concept (born from their research and creativity) and executed it. What evolved is what we now and call PageRank. So great ideas are really only recognized after the fact.

Let me try another tack. You're out with a friend and your friend remarks on a great service.product he/she just bought that's brand new. Yet you had the idea for that product too. You tell your friend this. Do you really expect your friend's honest reaction to be anything other than, "So what?" See, your idea never got anywhere -- while it was in your hands. The idea became great when someone brought it to market.

Ideas are useless in the sense that at any one time, <i>many</i> people could have the exact same idea. Ideas do "get in the air." So in that respect, ideas can be seen as commodities. It's getting the idea out there as something people can buy/use that <i>matters</i>. All writers understand this. It's not the story that was never written or never published that matters -- it's the story people can read or buy.

The problem is ideas do not exist. It is only when they morph into a tangible reality that they can be tested, verified, iterated on, and developed.<p>Put another way, an idea can be as great and fantastic and beautiful and groundbreaking as you dream it up to be - but none of that matters if it exists in your head only. <i>Only</i> when the idea enters a tangible reality can you really verify these claims. Does it work? how the hell do you know if it does not exist?<p>PageRank was <i>verified</i> to be a good idea only after they built a tangible search engine to test it with. And I'd argue their initial idea was iterated upon so much through the course of these real-life tests, that you can no longer give overwhelming credit to some spark of genius that bolted into sergey's head one fine day. It's about testing and iteration <i>in real life</i> not about mystical ideas seemingly sent down from the stars - that to me is why ideas are worthless.

If you have the ability to execute on your idea to test it's validity, then it's worth a lot! Think Chatroulette...hotmail....youtube...etc. Conversely, if you can't execute on the idea then it's worth far less and you should share it widely, get feedback, and work towards building a team around the idea that can execute upon it....<p>I think the meme has gotten popular because it's mostly oriented to people that can't execute on their ideas....and thus it holds some truth.

A lot of this is about definitions.<p><i>An</i> idea is useless.<p><i>A</i> piece of execution is useless.<p><i>Execution</i> means taking an idea, any idea, trying it out <i>and then coming up with new ideas at the same or lower level and trying them out</i>.<p>A good high-level idea by itself? Totally worthless. A team that can take a bad high-level idea, morph it into a mediocre one, then, through trial and error pound out the thousands of little ideas that make a business hum? Awesome.

<i>Is the "ideas are useless" meme being put out there just because so many newbies to the startup culture are too enamored with their ideas and think that the idea is all that matters, and so they have to be hit hard with the "ideas are useless" to snap them out of that thinking and start valuing execution?</i><p>I wouldn't exactly phrase it that way, but I think that does sum it up fairly well. I have spent a lot of time around the "gifted" community and I think an awful lot of extremely intelligent people are fundamentally lazy because, compared to most folks, they tend to skate through life and don't really have to work that hard.<p>When I was in 11th grade and a member of a college level math honor society, I tutored a mentally retarded 10th grade girl who had gotten herself into algebra. No one else in the honor society doing tutoring wanted to tutor her because it was too hard to teach her. So I always ended up working with her. She worked harder for her C's and D's than I ever did for my A's and B's. She never got in a snit over not understanding something. I learned to explain math concepts at least 3 ways without breaking a sweat and up to 12 ways if that was what it took. It was one of the most valuable experiences I ever had.<p>After something is built and makes a billion dollars or so, the world calls the founders/originators "geniuses". People who have the subjective experience of routinely being smarter than everyone else in the room often have trouble with certain realities and are often overconfident in their abilities in some ways -- for example, they tend to think if you disagree with them or have some criticism, you simply are too dumb to understand and can't possibly have a real point. They tend to think this because repeated experience in the real world has taught them this is typically true. So I think a lot of very smart people kind of identify themselves with the after-the-fact pronouncement of "genius" and gloss over what it took to accomplish the stuff that ultimately convinced the world this label was appropriate. And I think that is why you see this mantra that ideas aren't worth dirt, you actually have to roll up your sleeves and do the work to have anything of value.