

What Is An Idea Worth? - whalliburton
http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/10/what-is-idea-worth.html

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ojbyrne
Empirical results from digg.com (so far, based on public reports on
techcrunch.com and from Sarah Lacy's book):

Idea (Kevin Rose): $3 million

Connections (especially VCs) (Jay Adelson): $2 million

Implementation (me): 0

But hey, as far as Kevin and Jay were concerned, I should have been happy to
have a job.

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bayareaguy
Ideas by themselves aren't worth much until they are applied to a particular
situation. They act as coefficients in a production equation - good ideas
enhance production and poor ones diminish it.

~~~
unalone
I don't know. I'd argue with that: I think that the ability to have a good
idea is one that some people lack to some degree, and it's one that's more
valuable than any ability to execute.

The concept I had for my web site hatched about two years ago. I delayed on
taking it and using it for that time because I was CERTAIN that somebody at
one of the huge sites in the field would have implemented something like that.
From my point of view, the problem was immense and there was only a single
solution. Since then, demoing my concept pages to various people in the field,
I've come to realize that while people can INSTANTLY grasp why the idea works,
nobody even attempted to make the same logical approach to the problem as I
did.

I think you see this contrast best with Jobs and Wozniak, and with the people
who say that Jobs would have been nothing at all without Woz, that he was just
a marketer. Strictly speaking, that's true, because Jobs needed somebody else
to implement his ideas. However, looking at Jobs' career, that's always been
the case. He didn't build NeXT himself: he got people to build it for him.
Ditto the iPod, or the iTunes music store, or the iPhone, all of which were
things that he purportedly conceptualized himself. I think that his career
demonstrates that while Woz was the essential to creating Jobs' concept, that
the idealist who came up with the ideas to begin with is the one whose talent
is rarest and most valuable.

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antirez
Ideas are worthless: <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

Of course they are not, just it does not exist "I could get rich with the
right idea". It's a matter of passion, ideas, ability to create things,
ability to be flexible and change what you are doing while you are doing it
and so on.

After all the ability to adapt to the users requires a process of idea
creation. So just "an idea" is worthless. But a whole team without an idea
will eventually create one, it can go without one (not one, a good team will
have a lot of ideas, both bad and good, and evolving, and so on).

Edit: proof that ideas are not worthless, people that have a lot of good ideas
are more likely to get hired and earn more money. Good ideas are also a form
of advertising, people with interesting ideas created blogs with a lot of
readers, and so on. It's hard or impossible to create a market for ideas, but
are not worthless at all. Also some kind of works like 'interior designer'
sell ideas: paint this wall red, put this here and so on.

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rgrieselhuber
Glad to see someone questioning what has become conventional wisdom (and I
have been guilty of repeating in the past) because a few popular writers made
it so. There are some great points in the article and it prompted me to add a
few thoughts that I've had on the subject.

If ideas were worthless, you wouldn't have the patent industry, intellectual
property laws, royalty licensing, etc. These industries have their faults, to
be sure, but there is also a legitimate use of IP laws to protect smaller
startups from large corporations. And these laws exist because ideas are
valuable.

The value of ideas becomes relevant to entrepreneurs when you have to decide
whether to share an idea with a partner, potential investor or prospect
client. My advisor tells me repeatedly "if you talk about one of your ideas
with no NDA or similar mechanism in place, you have just given that person or
corporation a gift. It's no longer solely yours."

Most of the large corporations I deal with understand when I request an NDA
before getting into the details of any conversation. Most of the times I've
heard or read about people refusing to sign NDAs is when entrepreneurs deal
with VCs. They have their reasons for refusing to sign up front, which include
the reasoning that they hear hundreds of ideas everyday and aren't going to
take the time to sign an NDA for each one. A line of thinking that tends to
derive from this is that there are no unique ideas anymore, but I don't think
this is true and it shouldn't be taken for granted.

When dealing with VCs, it's even more important to understand that if you give
too much away without signing that NDA, not only are you giving them a gift,
you're giving it to someone who has both lots of money and strong connections
to others with the technical ability and experience to act on it. And they
don't think ideas are worthless.

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icey
Ideas and execution are like potential and kinetic energy. A nine ton boulder
isn't going to kill you by sitting still.

~~~
unalone
But all too many people argue that the potential energy is entirely worthless,
and that with enough hard work you can do well without having an original
idea.

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13ren
_ideas_ vs. _information_ :

    
    
      - "inside information"
      - info that can be worked out, but is not obvious (scanning the numbers got Warren Buffett started)
      - knowing where the gold/oil is
      - a new method that is cheaper/better than before
      - an opportunity that's not obvious

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maxklein
An idea as it is first conceived off, is not much good until it is tested. Not
implemented, but tested. Let's say you lived in the age before airplanes and
you had an idea for some type of engine that would make a plane take off. If
you sat somewhere and built this engine for 2 years and then stuck it in a
plane to test if it works, that plane won't fly.

Your initial idea is going to change as you realise and learn more things
about the area you are trying to realise something in. The plane engine needs
a lot of tweaking from whatever concept you came up with till it can fly.

Same with a business idea, but for a business idea, the right way to do so is
to place it in front of lots of people and just keep trying till you get it
right.

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vaksel
to me the whole concept that the idea is worthless has to do with the fact
that until you build it, you really have nothing. It isn't about actual value
that gets placed on the idea.

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davidw
Ideas are "worthless" because it's difficult or impossible to create a market
for them:

[http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/04/26/ideas-are-
wor...](http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/04/26/ideas-are-worthless)

~~~
diego
Perhaps it's difficult because it's inherently hard to completely transfer
ownership of an idea. Suppose you have a great idea and you have a track
record of great ideas to back it up. You offer to sell me your idea. Maybe the
idea is the key to solving a famous mathematical problem or a novel approach
to cure some disease. Problems:

1 - How do I know that you have a great idea if you don't tell me the idea
first, in which case you can't sell it anymore.

2 - If you "sell" me the idea you still have it, and you can sell it to others
(just like software).

That doesn't mean that ideas are worthless. It is possible to have an 'aha!'
insight that is extremely valuable _to you_. There are lots of things that are
extremely valuable to a person (meaning that you would pay a lot to keep them
if you had to) but completely worthless others because they can't use them.

~~~
davidw
Yes, that's more or less what I said in the linked posting: ideas are non-
excludable goods. To some degree you are right that they aren't rivalrous like
physical objects are, but they do lose their value when they are widespread. A
social-news-voting site isn't that hot an idea any more. It was a few years
ago.

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trapper
Most people never action their idea because they are scared of being wrong.
Execution is like a rollercoaster of fail & adjust cycles, which transform
your idea into money.

The original idea if not taken on the failcoaster is worthless.

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13ren
In support of the article's "actionable idea", Edison's quote on genius being
1% inspiration, 99% perspiration was referring to invention - necessarily done
in private, if it's to be patentable.

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whalliburton
A good attack on the "release early and often" process.

~~~
unalone
I don't necessarily think that it is. I think that "early and often" still
works if you've got a brilliant idea, since it lets you refine things. I think
of it like early drafts to a novel.

That being said, it's an EXCELLENT attack on the people who truly think ideas
are worthless. And I think that's a mindset that matters a lot.

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shard
I kind of see Fermat's Last Theorem as an idea without an execution plan.

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mattmaroon
$9.72

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LPTS
It's so funny watching you guys talk about how worthless ideas are. Maybe the
relationship between starting shitty web companies, obsessing about hits, ads,
and freemium accounts, and thinking ideas are worthless tells us more about
the kinds of thinkers who start shitty web companies then what ideas are
worth.

Most ideas suck. Those ideas are worthless. A few ideas are very valuable.
Those ideas are the things that change the world. Just because all the ideas
in your network are worthless, doesn't mean all ideas are worthless. The idea
that ideas are worthless is worthless, it omits relevant extreme cases.

I think what people mean when they say ideas are worthless is that they don't
have the vision or intelligence to sort through a pile of ideas and sort out
the good few from the worthless many.

~~~
fallentimes
I think what they mean is: business ideas are worthless without execution.

Edit: Added "business", which is what I meant in the first place. Sorry for
not clarifying.

~~~
qqq
Ideas are worthless _for making money_ without execution.

~~~
trapper
Ideas are worthless [snip] without execution. There, fixed that for you.

~~~
qqq
Some famous physics experiments were thought of before it was possible to
execute them. Worthless?

Also how do you execute Socrates' ideas in Euthyphro? Or are those worthless?

~~~
wheels
There was always an execution. It just happens to not have been the
experiment. The reason we know about those ideas is that somebody put a
significant amount of effort into telling the world.

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Allocator2008
That is a great insight. An idea is not just some "eureka!" moment. It is a
synthesis of little ideas into an implementable concept. Case in point:
genetic algorithms. These are based upon Darwin's principle of natural
selection, which itself, the memeticist Susan Blackmore has called "the best
idea anybody ever had". But sucessful implementation of the idea of natural
selection by way of genetic algorithms means finding a real world business
application for the principles involved, no easy task. Finding the right
business niche for a mathematical idea is half the game.

*The Fountainhead</> says it best regarding great ideas:

"Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was
probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was
considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But
thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their
caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted
darkness off the earth."

"Lifting darkness from the earth" - that is what entrepreneurship is all about
really I think.

~~~
LPTS
I don't think all ideas are worthless. But I do think all ideas in the
Fountainhead are worthless.

