Startups in stealth mode need one piece of advice.

I'd go even further and suggest that the current plaintiffs have proven they could not have made FB. Their focus on "getting credit" signals that they wouldn't have been as focused as Zuck on "making something cool".

From the posts on their engineering blog, it sounds like (esp in the early days) that was clearly the focus -- make something cool, get people to play with it.

I totally agree with his point that stealth mode is a pointless waste of time.

But some of his reasons only apply if what you're after is to be "The [Well Known Digital Property] Guy", ala Mark "The Facebook Guy!" Zuckerberg. For instance, if all you want is to get an independant company going selling enough units to building companies to help them manage their inventory of nails, so you don't have to work for someone else, having a small market is fine.

Secrecy is just as unimportant, but for different reasons.

While I agree with most of the article, I also think it's important who you choose to get advice from. Some people just don't get it. They'll discourage you without giving real constructive advice. Though I've never met PG in person, it seems like that's PG gift - the ability to give good feedback and direction on a product. But not everybody has that gift. My preferred path is to talk with tons of people to brainstorm thoughts that could lead to real product. Once you got a good product idea, brainstorm and start building it with a team. Then, get some good advice. you don't need to go totally public, but you need some good advice. Keep iterating. There will be a time where you go public and get feedback from lots more people. Also, I think it depends on the product. Sometimes you'll incubate a bit longer, sometimes shorter. Sometimes you'll need public feedback quicker, sometimes later. Early advice and feedback doesn't always means advice/feedback from everybody you meet.

Gee, it must be fun to call entrepreneurs silly.

My view is that the article is 99 44/100%, fresh, soft, still steaming, and actually destructive, BS.

The whole post is based on what is apparently deliberately both an obscure and even ambiguous use of the word 'idea'. So, with such deliberate obscurity and ambiguity, all he has is a way to insult entrepreneurs so that all he has is that steaming pile.

Details:

So, at the beginning of his post, to him an 'idea' is something worth protecting as intellectual property.

There actually are ideas worth protecting: Sometimes they are protected by Top Secret in the US DoD, via the USPTO, and by trade secret law. In research, the first person with a really good idea can win a valuable prize, e.g., a Nobel. Flatly, protecting ideas is not all just foolishness.

Then during his post he bends his idea to mean just some general description from 100,000 feet up that would need no protection and likely could not get any from, say, the USPTO.

So, by the end of his post, to him an 'idea' is something as vague as, say,

Facebook but for dog lovers, "with nearly all romantic angle", and, to keep quality up, need an invitation to get in.

Yes, for such an 'idea', to quote J. Doerr at KP, "execution is everything" and for a good reason: The idea is trivial; anyone could think up such ideas at a rate of one a minute for most of an hour.

Now we come to the real weakness in the author: He's missing the standard, old 'paradigm' of an entrepreneur with a good 'idea':

Start with a problem that millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of people have and would very much like to have solved or at least solved much better than at present.

Since some millions of people have the problem, the 'idea' of solving the problem is obvious. In that case, just why is the problem not solved?

Simple: No one knows how to solve it.

The classic example is one pill taken once to cure any cancer. And, that's not the 'idea'. Instead the 'idea' would be how to make the pill, and that would need protection. In terms of entrepreneurship, the pill is the 'secret sauce', and the word 'secret' is well chosen.

So, the author is deliberately confusing a trivial idea, one pill to cure cancer, with a difficult idea, how to make such a pill. Silly author with a silly post.

Q. But your example is from biomedical. The article and HN are concerned with software.

A. Oh, poor one: There are plenty of big problems that can be solved by software and a good idea where the idea is quite difficult to construct but much better than anything else available or obvious.

So, the big problem of the author is that he does not understand the possibility of such ideas.

So, he has

1.) Execution is more important than the idea

For a trivial idea, yes. However, if the idea was actually how to make a one pill cure for any cancer, then the idea was all that was important and, believe me, "execution" will be only very routine.

2.) Someone else has the exact same idea.

Nonsense. Absolutely 100% total nonsense. I've published papers in the peer-reviewed research literature where the standard requirement is "new, correct, and significant". Note the "new". And I got a Ph.D. from a good research university, and there the main requirement was "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". Note the "original".

3.) Totally unique ideas generally don't make it

Nonsense. What he means is, say, a new product, of a very different kind in all respects, e.g., one that requires customers to do something quite new, for a new need for new customers in a new market generally doesn't make it. Right.

But a one pill cure for cancer, which would be "totally unique", would have to fight customers off with rings of guards, literally.

4.) The most likely cause of failure is your incompetence, not losing to the competition

Yup, insult the entrepreneur again.

5.) You desperately need real feedback

Yup, insult the entrepreneur again.

6.) First mover advantage is just silliness

Nonsense: A first mover advantage is just that, an "advantage" and not "silliness".

Net, the author wants to insult entrepreneurs and doesn't understand what a really good 'idea' actually is.

Umm actually the guys who coined the term "first mover advantage" actually wrote a paper explaining why they were wrong. They published it in the harvard business review so u should be able to find it via google.