Let’s End the Myth that Ideas Are Worthless

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.

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.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanielwhittemore would lead me to believe Nathaniel is not a "code"/execution person (I could be wrong, obviously).

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).

It's almost a tautology - the execution guys say the execution is most important, the idea guys think it's all about the idea.

Like most things, the "best" answer probably lies somewhere between the two extremes.

I think a lot of this boils down to opportunity and guts. While everyone can have a billion-dollar idea, and many of them could execute parts of it (the coding, or the marketing, or whatever).

It takes a special set of circumstances and personality traits to actually make a billion-dollar idea into a billion-dollar business.

This is easily demonstrated by the startup community itself. How many homeruns are there? How many flops?

;)

Use discretion, crunch the numbers, make educated decisions, and let the competition rely on silly absolutist platitudes.

Because simply building something doesn't equal success. Other factors are involved, such as potential need for capital, marketing etc.

I would not say ideas are worth zero -- at least not without qualifying/explaining that statement. [1] I believe it's more accurate to say ideas are worth very little -- usually much less than the idea's creator thinks it is -- relative to everything else needed for project success. And many ideas do get built out into existence, and flop, where we see that generally 90% of startups fail.

The confusion as I see it with this debate is "idea people" having the misconception that a great idea equals success, and only needs the product to be built. That's usually not the case. And the problem here is that there is zero risk in having an idea, but elevated risk in every other part of growing a potential business.

As to the importance of execution, well, you can have an average or sub-par project executed extremely well be very valuable and profitable, but an idea without any execution will always be worth zero no matter how great its potential.

I do believe ideas can have value. Highly valuable ideas are ones that are novel and provide great advantage upon execution in the marketplace. These are generally rare. I can only think of a couple in the tech space over the past decade: the page ranking model of Google, and the video sharing model of YouTube.

[1] An idea is worth zero in the dollar value sense because if the idea never leaves the brain of the creator to be introduced into the world it never introduces any value into the world, and remains only an idea.