Every time someone says something about ideas being less important than execution I feel like he/she is oversimplifying it (I'm not saying the author of the post is missing the point though) and someone out there is missing the idea.
Initial, untested ideas are worthless. The list of 998 ideas are probably all things they just came up with on the spot, unexposed to the effects of evolution.
But let's say we took this idea, "Prepackaged school supplies based on the lists from the school districts," tested it. The test would have to consist of some sort of execution. Now we let's say we found out that no one gives a shit about school supplies and don't buy it anyways. Well now we amend our original idea. We have a new idea, it's still an idea. We executed to determine what works and what doesn't. This new idea is worth slightly more. After many, many iterations, we'll still have an idea in the end. If it is carefully documented and proven with a history of execution. This idea is worth something, and I would buy it. The idea, only after execution has value because the execution is factual proof.
Therefore, ideas can be worth something and can be sold. In fact, the idea, plan, knowledge, whatever you call it, is what's worth something in the end. What's worthless is an untested idea, because it is grounded only in imagination.
Also every time you execute an idea, it becomes exposed. It loses it's value because it is free (unless you patent it, but that's just some artificial thing we invented to force value into ideas after they are exposed). But the idea, before anyone else knows about it, and in the instant it is executed, has value.
Of course this means that more important than any single idea is in the ability of the person to come up with innovative ideas. We can all follow the model of evolution and improve our ideas, but who can iterate faster, and predict more accurately what works (guiding evolution), will ultimately dominate.
Execution is simply how well you predict what works, and how well you don't lie to yourself. In this sense execution may be more important than any single idea, but an idea can still have value.
The way you are saying it, is implying that all executions are equal. They are not.
(think of the biggest companies you know, and their idea was not original at all, just the execution was different. (better).
Before Google there were a myriad of other search engines. Before Facebook there was Friendster (should be classical case study for poor execution), Myspace etc).
From what I can say it seems that idea doesn't matter (i.e. doesn't have to be original at all), as long as the execution is good/better than everybody's else.
Sure, Friendster validated the 'social networks' idea, but it was ultimately FB that gave a really good execution to that idea.
So the difference between a 100mil, to a 10bill company, is simply execution.
You can say execution is a multiplier of an idea, and if the idea is stupid, it doesn't matter. But that doesn't make idea the most important thing. Most ideas are not that great/original anyways.
You can be a mom and pop burger shop, (easy), or you can be mcdonalds (not that easy), even if the idea is the same (sell burgers), it is the execution and scale of operation that wins at the end.
> Execution is simply how well you predict what works, and how well you don't lie to yourself.
I never meant to imply that execution is always equal.
The idea doesn't have to be original, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. You can't be completely ignorant and go ahead with your flying horse idea. But your incompetency at realizing your idea sucks is essentially bad execution.
The flying horse idea is horrible, but it won't matter only because you'll realize immediately after executing that it's a shitty idea. So in that sense you'll amend your flying horse idea and try something better like a flying car instead. But after that iteration it's a new idea.
Google and Facebook certainly weren't original, but they are also completely different from when they started. The idea itself is trivialized in the long term, but only if you are capable of logically iterating and filtering out bad ideas.
I think you should try to grasp my definition of what is an idea and what is execution in relation to an idea. Comparing execution to an idea is like comparing apples and oranges.
My main point is that idea and execution are two different things that are part of the same process.
I agree that executing ability of the people running the company is more important than any individual idea.
Sure it's easy to come up with ideas, but it's much harder to come up with ideas that are good. If this list was vetted, I have a feeling it would be significantly shorter.
For example, #2: "Incubator site providing office space, hosting, etc. for startups that are seed funded." Unless you franchise it, this isn't scalable at all. It's an idea, perhaps even a business idea, but it's not a startup idea.
Or, #9: "Herbal Flavored Gum. MMM...rosemary." I don't know much about the flavored gum industry, but I would imagine their margins are razor thin. It's not really a startup idea as there is no innovation here, and no opportunity to improve the margins (well, may be there is an opportunity, but it's not at all evident from the description).
Coming up with this list in such a fashion is definitely an interesting exercise and I applaud Seth for doing it, but the quality of the ideas is a bit underwhelming. Perhaps if they had to elaborate a bit on the descriptions and do some basic analysis, it would be a lot more interesting.
"the quality of the ideas is a bit underwhelming."
So the reason for this is that it was a very diverse group, and some of the most talented people in the program just had really terrible ideas. Whenever I'm online I'm always looking for new and interesting ideas, whereas there was another guy in the program who spent all his time online looking movers and shakers in the city who he hadn't yet met. And while his ideas were pretty bad, he was clearly the most successful of any of us, and contributed an enormous amount to the program in other ways.
Recently some startups started selling customized sweets. You could mix your own flavor in a web interface and then order the gums, build on demand. (I only know startups for chocolate, cereals and coffee doing this atm).
> Sure it's easy to come up with ideas, but it's much harder to come up with ideas that are good
And you can't prove/know they are good until they are executed. Harder in this sense would just refer to the work required to iterate until it becomes good.
So all ideas you just "come up" with will all effectively be of uncertain value.
While I generally agree with you, I don't think all ideas are created equal. Some ideas are obviously bad (going into an established industry with razor thin margins without a clear plan for innovation; fundamentally unscalable businesses; etc.) Some ideas are obviously good (planes that fly twice as fast at half the cost without compromising safety). Some ideas are really good but look really bad, others are really bad but look really good. Some ideas aren't iterable (if you spend three years and half a billion dollars on building a plant that brings cars to the masses and find out that the masses are perfectly happy with horses you don't have much space left to iterate).
It's hard. Really really hard. I don't think any given formula can capture the complexity of it all. The current model (fast iteration) has obvious flaws - there are plenty of businesses that turned out to be massively successful that were fundamentally not iterable.
I meant each idea will have uncertain value until you test it, no matter how smart you are. Of course if you, know it's a good idea, it will have value. But it will only be valuable to you. Some ideas seem more valuable than others simply because most people already have experience testing it. So that's why some or all aspects of the idea may seem ludicrous. So based on my experience, a flying genetically modified horse is not a good one because o already know genetic modification at that level will be much harder than engineering a plane.
I disagree with you about how not all ideas are iterable. One idea can iterate into another. Both a plant that makes toothbrushes and a flying horse are different from the original idea. Iteration simply means taking what doesn't work and replacing it. If the whole idea doesn't work, then you simply iterate into a new one. There really is no guideline as to what constitute the same idea after you iterate. After all, most ideas completely change after iteration right? Iteration is a process not tied to any idea, because it involves changing the idea. It is tied to the person.
What I meant is that some ideas are very expensive and time consuming to turn into products, even if you work like hell to make sure you build something as minimal as possible. If you're working on an idea like that, and you believe that you can't truly iterate until you release, then these ideas are less iterable. Of course you can try and test the idea against the market before you build the product - talk to customers, create focus groups, do dummy advertising to gauge customer response, but you can't really know until you build the product.
For example, we're building a very high performance database. This type of software, even in its minimal conception, takes at least a year to build (at best). We talk to customers as much as we can, and we've adjusted our direction according to their feedback, but we can't iterate on this in the same way as the web guys can. We can't release a slightly different version every week and see what happens, we have no choice but to collect requirements, make the best judgements we can, and build according to those judgements. If, after a year or two of building, we find out that our product doesn't sell, we will have spent a lot of time and money at that point, and our options will be very limited. We can't easily switch direction because the software is so complex to build, and we can't do many incremental releases because the deployment process to customer sites is very time consuming. If you have a suggestion on how to iterate this type of project, I'm all ears :)
> ...but you can't really know until you build the product.
I agree with you completely and this is exactly what I originally said.
> If you have a suggestion on how to iterate this type of project, I'm all ears :)
In the end you'll have to answer to reality right? Iteration is a process that's as valid for you as it is for a web startup. It may be a longer process for you because you're working on cutting edge technology, but in the end you still have to answer to reality.
Let's say I am designing a user interface. This is something easily testable. I could try a blue colored button and see how users react. Now I must figure out how to change the color of the button to blue. I figure out that if I add background-color:##0000EE to the CSS it accomplishes this. Great! Technical feat accomplished. I think in your situation you want to figure out a) do users want our new database and b) how to create this new database. This would be analogous to a) do users want blue buttons and b) how do I make blue buttons. In web development changing the buttons to blue is trivial, so we can easily test if users actually want blue buttons. Iteration is so much easier in web-development because a lot of the stuff isn't technically challenging. But this doesn't mean other industries like department stores, electronics companies, and database companies don't have to answer to what ultimately works. Your database company, if it largely exists to implement one single idea, and test one single idea, is then simply at the stage of the iteration process where I was figuring out how to technically achieve that one iterative change.
But I do agree with you in that in this type of startup, you would probably have to get a little more detailed as to how you operate. I would liken your effort to one of creating a time machine, or a fusion energy engine. If you're implementing something as new and innovative as a time machine, or fusion energy, I would imagine that at this point iteration is of non-concern, because you have yet to even complete one iteration of the idea. But I'm assuming your idea is not as technically challenging or revolutionary as a time machine or fusion energy (no offense!), and that you're getting into the implementation details already (since you mentioned talking to customers and focus groups, I'm guess you've already overcome the majority of the technical challenge).
If you don't have a completed product to release and are still in the process of conceptualizing an idea and guiding the evolution about to take place, then you're a little more zoomed into the picture. In this case you don't iterate the idea just yet, but you would iterate the developing idea. In my opinion the best preparation is to look at history. Examine what worked in the past and identify patterns and roots of problems, not just examine the present. History is the combined repository of knowledge acquired from everyone else about what worked and what didn't. You could possibly gain access to some guy who already iterated many things for you and is telling you what he knows. I'm sure it's obvious, but so many of my friends undervalue the importance of history education. Learning from other's mistakes is probably more valuable from learning from your own, since other people, combined, have made way more mistakes. By obtaining past knowledge, this would be the best way to revise your idea before it's completely solidified for the first iteration.
If you already completed the core of your product, then there's little recourse to salvaging a faulty product without morphing it completely.
I'm assuming most of your money is spent developing one important technology, and that is the reason why you won't have room to change if it doesn't work? If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. The point of iteration is to swap out what doesn't work. If it so just happens to be the foundation of all your improvements, then there's no helping that. You could identify a specific reason why it didn't work, and iterate again by replacing that huge undertaking that didn't work. It would still technically be an iteration, from your perspective, even if it means starting a new company with new investors. That core idea may not have worked, but that wouldn't necessarily mean the improvements you got right along the way were bad. They can still be applied to a new core technology that you swap in that works.
Iteration is what the people in a business do. The idea is what gets revised in the process. An idea can always get revised, and always should be in order to conform to reality.
I have seen those and I thought they were like "College Painters/Haulers" (i.e. hire a student who needs the money) meaning the "Hubbie" here implies a working family man, as opposed to a "lousy bachelor who might squander your money on booze".
I find it a bit odd when people come to meetups for techies with an idea for a web-app that they can't share. I know a guy who's got an idea for a project-management app that sounds pretty cool. It's an extremely crowded area but I still think he's got a shot.
Rather than keeping this idea to himself, I think he should tell everyone about it. Let his ideas spread. Let people adjust to his new take on project management. If 1,000 tech- or business-savvy people are aware of his concept and speak to other people like that on a regular basis then he already has a test-bed of people to launch his product into. At the moment I believe only a handful of people are aware of the product and whilst he's toiling away on the code, no one is being primed to buy.
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It really depends of the Idea, genuine idea executed well, is priceless, even simple Ideas, but no matter how good your execution of a bad Idea is, well you won't get anything valuable out of it, maybe just loosing time and money, and considering that without Idea, there's no execution, ideas are worth a lot. The problem is: there are not really that much good Ideas as people like to think.
For a bit of context, this was the product of an brainstorming exercise set by seth godin to his students during his "six month mba program". You probably should read anymore into these ideas than that.
My mom had a business were she took a sketch from a (couture) designer, and made patterns for production. There's all sorts of value added there you can exploit (designing a pattern that someone can actually wear is a learned skill that not many people have...)
This is an ugly post. really. For the people who are working on things right now, those who care about execution, you can help them by not shouting it in order to appear as a smart gut.
Initial, untested ideas are worthless. The list of 998 ideas are probably all things they just came up with on the spot, unexposed to the effects of evolution.
But let's say we took this idea, "Prepackaged school supplies based on the lists from the school districts," tested it. The test would have to consist of some sort of execution. Now we let's say we found out that no one gives a shit about school supplies and don't buy it anyways. Well now we amend our original idea. We have a new idea, it's still an idea. We executed to determine what works and what doesn't. This new idea is worth slightly more. After many, many iterations, we'll still have an idea in the end. If it is carefully documented and proven with a history of execution. This idea is worth something, and I would buy it. The idea, only after execution has value because the execution is factual proof.
Therefore, ideas can be worth something and can be sold. In fact, the idea, plan, knowledge, whatever you call it, is what's worth something in the end. What's worthless is an untested idea, because it is grounded only in imagination.
Also every time you execute an idea, it becomes exposed. It loses it's value because it is free (unless you patent it, but that's just some artificial thing we invented to force value into ideas after they are exposed). But the idea, before anyone else knows about it, and in the instant it is executed, has value.
Of course this means that more important than any single idea is in the ability of the person to come up with innovative ideas. We can all follow the model of evolution and improve our ideas, but who can iterate faster, and predict more accurately what works (guiding evolution), will ultimately dominate.
Execution is simply how well you predict what works, and how well you don't lie to yourself. In this sense execution may be more important than any single idea, but an idea can still have value.