Let’s End the Myth that Ideas Are Worthless

The article is fighting strawmen. I've never heard anyone say that starting off with a good idea isn't important.<p>A good idea is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.<p>What the author doesn't argue against is that potentially good ideas are fairly abundant and easily obtained. These 'potentially good ideas' (that is, ideas which sound like they would work, but for which there is not yet any good evidence either way) are not worth much not because it isn't important to start from one of them, but instead, because they are not a scarce resource. Give me a 'potentially good idea' along with some quantitative data that suggests there is a huge market, and that the likely cost to acquire customers is far less than the likely lifetime present value of each customer, and suddenly the former 'potentially good idea' is much more valuable - because ideas that come with the data to back them up are much more scarce.

It's the relative ubiquity of good ideas that makes them worthless. How much would someone pay you for your "great idea"?<p>Developers are constantly bombarded by "idea men" who want someone else to do all the work because they think the "idea" is somehow worth half (or more) of the profit.<p>Here is a perfect example, it was posted 12/29 on Craigslist Boston (under Gigs-&#62;Computer)<p><i>need Android and iphone app creator and partner for next big thing<p>"I am looking for someone who can create and program an Android and iphone app, integrate the apps into a customer database and billing program and also serve as the tech side of the venture.<p>My idea is gold and EASY and low tech and can spread virally fast, there will be money for you on the back end if this works. U.S AND india welcome. my only requirments are that you be available to communicate via email, text, IM and phone reliably, AND that you have a burning desire to make the next big thing. "</i>

I tend to be someone who would emphasize the importance of execution relative to the importance of ideas, however I certainly don't believe that ideas don't matter.<p>Ideas have value to the extent that they are coupled with excellent execution. One without the other is worthless but combined they have value. Because of this interaction simplistic statements such as "ideas are valuable" or "ideas are worthless" are both incorrect.<p>The same situation even applies to something more concrete than a simple idea - code. I may have developed a high-quality code base with extensive functionality. However that code has little if any value in and of itself, unless I can apply it to solving a problem that people actually have and are willing to pay for.

Here are some ideas that are worth something.<p>Matter is made of atoms of about 100 different kinds that are constantly jiggling around, which jiggling we experience as heat.<p>Boiling water kills germs that cause disease. Washing hands with soap before eating removes and kills germs that cause disease. It is particularly important to keep germs out of open wounds. Pure phenol and 400ppm chlorine are effective and fairly safe ways to kill germs on skin and equipment. An active enteric glucose-sodium cotransport mechanism dramatically increases enteric sodium uptake and can usually prevent diarrhea from causing death by dehydration if you mix glucose 1:1 with sodium ions in water. Breathing smoke dramatically increases your chances of getting a lung infection; make charcoal outdoors for your indoor cooking fire to avoid this. Mosquitoes carry dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; mosquito screens and nets can prevent mosquito bites and thus these illnesses. Micronutrient deficiencies cause many horrible illnesses.<p>Blowing air up through molten iron heats it dramatically and oxidizes impurities, including carbon, into a slag that floats on top; burning off the extra carbon this way gives you steel much more cheaply than you can get iron out of a bloomery or finery forge, although then you need to add some carbon and manganese back in. You can fix nitrogen from the air into ammonia by reacting it with hydrogen on a magnetite catalyst at 200 atmospheres and 400 degrees celsius. Heating rubber with sulfur makes it hard and tough. Adding carbon black to it makes it much tougher and also resistant to sunlight. Aluminum oxide dissolved in molten cryolite can be electrolyzed into aluminum metal with graphite electrodes.<p>Information in the form of a sequence of symbols can be losslessly encoded into a sequence of symbols from any other alphabet, with only a constant factor expansion or contraction. This encoding can include error-correction symbols that permit the automatic detection and correction of transmission or encoding errors if they are not too bad, and indeed for any given probability of a transmission error you can construct a code that reduces the probability of an uncorrectable error to an arbitrarily low level for any transmission rate less than a certain rate. Continuous signals such as sounds can be "sampled" many times per second and thus converted into a sequence of numbers, which can be encoded in this way; band-limited signals can be reproduced perfectly by this mechanism if they are sampled at twice their bandwidth. Nearly any physical phenomenon can be used to encode information by this means. It's often easiest to use an alphabet of just two "symbols".

Any idea that is simple enough to pop into your head and is simple enough for people to understand in a sound bite is simple enough to have occurred to thousands of people.<p>Most truly world-changing ideas are a bit more difficult to arrive at, communicate and/or implement. These are not so worthless. Of course, these usually are combinations of many ideas and take real work to figure out.

It's very interesting to note the backgrounds of the various people involved in this debate.<p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanielwhittemore" rel="nofollow">http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanielwhittemore</a> would lead me to believe Nathaniel is not a "code"/execution person (I could be wrong, obviously).<p>Whereas the people on the other side of the debate seem to be largely execution guys - coders or self-styled "product" guys (YCombinator, Eric Ries).<p>It's almost a tautology - the execution guys say the execution is most important, the idea guys think it's all about the idea.<p>Like most things, the "best" answer probably lies somewhere between the two extremes.

I really do love the idea guy, they rail and rail "hey I am worth something" but the fact remains they are worth very little. Lets say for example I decided to start a company, I have a good group of guys that can do anything and we have capital. We don't need an idea to form a company, we could start a fabrication shop or a coin laundry and potentially profit just as much as venturing off and building a new and novel widget. It's the execution, there is nothing sexy about fabrication but the world needs it and companies start every day that provide fabrication services. The guy that says hey lets start a fabrication shop is worth very little to that equation even if he has an idea about how to revolutionize how fabrication is done. Somehow when it comes to software this fact get's muddled, people think because software is complex that somehow the ideas for software are worth more when in reality the idea guy is not bringing much more to the table than "hey lets start a fab shop". Every so often we have a series of post challenging this conventional wisdom, but I have yet to see an effective argument for the idea guy being worth much to the total equation.

Can we end the myth that using superlatives somehow adds credence to a contrarian standpoint? I can't speak for anybody else, but if I see an article titled "Ideas are Worthless", I just won't read it. That said:<p>Use discretion, crunch the numbers, make educated decisions, and let the competition rely on silly absolutist platitudes.

Let's not. Ideas really <i>are</i> worth nothing when compared to execution.<p>Don't take my word for it: look at successful companies. What're the ideas behind the top 10 Fortune 500 companies?<p><pre><code> 1. WalMart - a bigger and cheaper convenience store 2. Exxon - gasoline 3. Chevron - gasoline 4. GE - conglomerate: appliances, aviation, electronics, energy, weapons, etc. 5. Bank of America - banking, investment banking 6. ConocoPhillips - gasoline 7. AT&#38;T - telecommunications 8. Ford - cars 9. Chase - banking, investment banking 10. HP - computers, consulting services </code></pre> (Source: <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/</a>)<p>The very repetitiveness of that list kinda shows you that novelty isn't really that exciting, eh?<p>Want another data point? How about... oh I dunno... companies acquired by Google in the last few months:<p><pre><code> * Widevine - DRM for television * Phonetic Arts - speech recognition * BlindType - touch interface typing technology * Plannr - scheduling/calendaring * Quiksee - video * SocialDeck - gaming </code></pre> (Source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google</a>)<p>Lots of good ideas there? Perhaps... but to my eyes each of these companies falls into the "$IDEA done right" style of startup. As do most, really -- nearly every startup pitch I've heard falls into the "X done right" rubric.<p>And that's by no means a slight: taking something that generally sucks and doing it right is <i>really</i> hard. But that's the point, isn't it? Nearly every idea's been done before... it's about delivering better than the competition.<p>So let's not start giving raw ideas much merit. This focus on results is good, and it's healthy, and it's what makes technology startups interesting. After all, technology is usually evolutionary, and rarely revolutionary.<p>[Edit: sources, formatting.]

I think this article involves quite a lot of extraneous words .. in my opinion only the last three paragraphs say something interesting.<p>--<p>Who is truly saying that ideas are worthless? It's blatantly obvious that <i>ideas</i> and <i>execution</i> are two sides of the same coin.<p>An 'ideas' person coming to the table with an 'idea' (rather than resources or talent) is generally berated is because talk is cheap. Execution is generally what's lacking - so it stands to reason that people are primed to focus on getting things done.

I think even good ideas are worthless. The thing is, bad ideas are worse than worthless.<p>PageRank was a good idea, but it wasn't worth anything until they built Google. It was a good idea because it offered a solid foundation on which to build value.<p>Your bad idea might cause you to waste years of your life. Not only can you not sell it for anything, but you could pour resources into it only to see them burn up like an incinerator.<p>Aim for worthless. "Worthless" and "Won't screw you" is a good place to start.

Ideas are worthless: I have 100 different ideas per day, and so every human being on earth.<p>What makes ideas worth is to become reality, execution and testing. You have to test your ideas to see if they could become worth anything,or just if they are false creations of your mind, that takes time and effort.<p>It is also very difficult to say: This idea I had yesterday is very bad, and they are when your only data you had what presumptions not based on reality, it goes against your ego. People think their ideas are true: How many atheist believe in God?, How many Christians do not?<p>A lot of people spend their live thinking ideas without taking the effort to test them on reality, that is worth zero. That's it.<p>Nobody is going to pay you for "having the idea of a novel", but maybe they are for taking the effort and risk of spending one year writing it.<p>I have software that recognizes the voice, the idea is simple, the execution took a lot of years and is going to take more years to be the best of the world.

It's not ideas that are worthless; it's the 'visions'.<p>It might be true that a bad idea with flawless execution is just as bad as vice versa, but the thing is, too many of the self-described 'idea' people don't actually have any 'idea' of how to implement and bring their vision to life. They just want it to magically happen. Those are the people with worthless ideas, because they're not even ideas, they're just delusions of grandeur.<p>On the other hand, I've met my fair share of legitimate idea people who also have an idea of how to architect and implement want they want in a real, functioning web application, they just would rather have someone else, who's really into it, dig in to the nitty gritty implementation specifics (read: code) while they do the high-level technical and strategical architecting. That's totally fine, and those type of idea people are far from worthless IMO.

I don't get it. I read the entire post looking for an actual debunking of the "myth."<p>He mentions change.org - which shortly after it launched had several competitors. It wasn't until the company changed the way it was executing that it succeeded. If any of the other companies had executed better with the same idea then change.org would not have been a success. So it all came down to superior execution.<p>Everyone has ideas, not everyone can execute on them. Look at facebook/myspace - can you honestly say that facebook isn't a better executed social network?

Execution requires 2 or more ingredients.<p>If your a fantastic ideas guy, and an incredible evangelist - you will win.<p>If your a fantastic designer, and incredible sales guy - you will win.<p>The execution is the final baked cake, once all ingredients have gone in.<p>So in order to be a great execution'ist, I'm afraid you can't just be a good coder, you have to also be a ideas guy/designer/evangelist/sales guy/marketing guru/etc.

I think a helpful analogy might be to look at the "execution" side of the argument as "blind squirrels" and the "ideas" side of the argument as "paralyzed from the neck down squirrels".<p>Both are less than perfect but at least a blind squirrel has a chance at stumbling on a nut in the forrest. The paralyzed squirrel can see the nuts but will never get them on their own.

Some ideas are valuable. Most ideas are worthless. It is common to run into overenthusiastic "idea guys" with obviously worthless ideas, and it is easier to tell them that all ideas are worthless than to tell them that their idea, in particular, is worthleess; so we lie, and say that all ideas are worthless, even though we know that there are some exceptions.

Someone have a cached copy? It's not loading for me. I agree completely with the statement, but would like to see his reasoning.

I bet Google and Apple employees that were fired for leaking information could put a price on ideas.

That whole schtick seems tautological to me. It's like saying<p>"What's the use of having an idea if you have no <i>idea</i> how to implement it?"

I generally agree, since otherwise having a patent system would not make sense. Getting a patent, however, requires reduction to practice.

<p><pre><code> What is an “idea” for a startup? A startup idea is an assertion about two things; a problem that people have and a way to solve it. </code></pre> Here's why this post is both right and wrong, in one sentence. It's wrong, because 'a way to solve it' is not 'an idea'. Rather, 'a way to solve it' consists of a great many ideas, conceived of, and strung together, over an extended period of time. All these ideas together are what is called 'execution'. You can't solve anything without consistently having new ideas about how to solve the challenge currently at hand. That, in turn, is why the post is right: having the right idea at the right time is important. It's just that the single idea that precipitated it all is simply not very valuable by itself.

A related claim is that ideas are easy and plentiful and execution is hard and everything.<p>Let's see:<p>To resolve the question of P versus NP, all it takes is a good idea.<p>Easy? By all means, I'll give you a week! Worthless? Clay Mathematics Institute will give you $1 million for a correct answer. There will likely also be some startup opportunities. Uh, there is a lot of history to suggest that don't hold your breath while looking for a solution and that shouldn't plan a lot of other activities for the week, month, year, decade, lifetime while you find the 'easy idea' for a solution.<p>Many people would like a single, cheap pill that will cure any cancer. All it takes is an idea. Why sequence DNA? To get a fundamental ('reductionist') understanding of how cells work and, then, how they go wrong in the case of cancer and how to intervene to cure the cancer. People have been working hard on DNA since about 1950. Progress? A LOT. One pill to cure all cancers? Not yet. But, again, all it takes is an idea.<p>The Silicon Valley, John Doerr, Guy Kawasaki claim that ideas are easy has in mind for an 'idea' just some 100,000 foot vague, one-line statement of a new business direction and missing any detail or significance. E.g., Facebook but just for dog owners. Or, matchmaking and social networking from GPS checkins. So, by an 'idea' they are not thinking about resolving P versus NP or finding a pill to cure cancer.<p>For such a vague one-line statement, sure, ideas are worthless.<p>But, more specifically, especially in technical fields, an 'idea' is something worth protecting as 'intellectual property' (IP) because it is the crucial, core 'secret sauce', difficult to duplicate or equal, that provides a powerful, valuable solution to a big problem. That an 'idea' could be valuable, and difficult to find, e.g., 'non-obvious', goes way back to the founding of the USPTO. So, here is strong evidence that good, new ideas are difficult to find and valuable.<p>So, with the description that a new business should provide a valuable solution to a big problem, the 'idea' is the 'secret sauce' and IP crucial for being able to provide the solution. In this case, typically the idea is difficult and valuable. For the "execution", that may be just putting the pills in the bottles. BELIEVE me, if you have a good idea for a one pill cure for cancer, then execution will be routine!<p>Instead:<p>Good ideas are difficult, rare, and valuable. Given a good idea, execution is routine.<p>So, to explain the Silicon Valley, Doerr, Kawasaki, etc. claim there are at least two answers:<p>First, they are playing a negotiating game of 'preemptively' stating that what the entrepreneur brings to the table, the 'idea', is worthless while their money is worth, well, money. Here, of course, the entrepreneur can say:<p>"Money is all green, there's lots of it, Bernanke is printing more by the tens of billions, interest rates are very low meaning that for the gains the LPs need the money needs to be put to work, and the last 10 years of venture capital show that good projects giving good returns are rare. Uh, we believe that we have a project that can give very good returns. Want cut out the nonsense and talk more seriously now?"<p>Second, and even worse, they have had essentially no exposure to ideas such as solving P versus NP, being the crucial key to providing a valuable solution to a big problem, having value as IP, or being worth a valuable patent.<p>Either way, an entrepreneur should not want such a person on their Board. Else, at some point the entrepreneur may conclude that the business needs another idea, needs a small project to make progress with the idea, has to explain the project to the Board, and now has to face people who believe that ideas are easy, plentiful, and worthless. Really BIG bummer.<p>But the secret is that, really, venture partners essentially just ignore ideas, of any kind, good, bad, or otherwise. Instead, for a Series A investment in, say, a Web 2.0 project, the partners will look at ComScore numbers. They may want to see at least 100,000 unique users a month and the number of unique users per month growing quickly.<p>For a Series B, they want to see revenue, earnings, and both growing quickly.<p>For the business being 'defensible', they want to count on 'engaged users' instead of difficult to duplicate or equal secret sauce.<p>Given such numbers, they regard the ideas as irrelevant or nearly so.<p>My suspicion is that these criteria are enforced by the LPs.<p>The idea is crucial for the entrepreneur, but entrepreneurs should not think that 'ideas' in any sense are relevant to the evaluations of the venture partners.