[downandout]

Probably the biggest thing I've learned through hard experience is that great ideas by themselves have very little value. At this point it's irrelevant whether he copied the idea from his client(s), or from Friendster or MySpace. Out of pure luck, Zuck's version appealed to the masses enough to get them to register for the site and use the contact importer. After that, skill took over - Zuck knew that if a high enough percentage of users allowed the site to spam their contacts, growth to billions of users was a mathematical certainty.

This is instructive for many startups. You don't need amazing or even original ideas. You do need to have growth features in place that, if users choose to use them, will make world domination an inevitable conclusion. Then it's just a matter of optimizing until a high enough percentage of users use that feature. If you are successful at this, you will have perpetual growth.

[cookiecaper]

I totally agree. Innovation is not necessarily valued by the market. There is no shame in seeing what others are doing and copying it -- that's how the free market is supposed to work. The competition is good for everyone, and indeed, analyzing what's working and what's not for your predecessors and competitors can often be instructive in developing something that can eventually conquer the world, which Facebook assuredly did. 100% on board with execution being many orders of magnitude more important than the germinating idea.

However, the Winklevoss twins had hired Zuck and communicated their proprietary information so that they could get his execution. It is absolutely shady to get hired to develop a product, chicken out, and then implement your own version using your client's intellectual property. It's obvious that Zuck was in hot water here; if he wasn't, he wouldn't have paid out to the Winklevoss's.

It appears the lesson from Zuck is "take whatever you can and win, then deal with any potential consequences from a position of strength".

[tedmiston]

> Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

> —PG, Ideas for Startups (2005)

http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html

[davidivadavid]

I think that view is a little simplistic in more ways than one.

The first is that, erm, yes, there's a huge market for startup ideas. It's called the get-rich-quick-scheme industry. Sells billions of dollars worth of goods every year trying to teach people what business ideas will make them rich.

The second is that it depends what you mean by "idea." If you mean some generic one sentence pitch about some vague idea ("Uber for pets"), then, sure, it's probably not worth much.

If you have a very precise plan that includes details about go to market strategies and execution, and that is based on data only you are in possession of, it can be worth a lot of money. That's essentially what Peter Thiel talks about when he mentions good startups being based on "secrets" (the way I understood it, anyway).

That there's no liquid market for such ideas doesn't tell you much about their value.

[tedmiston]

I think when Peter Thiel talks about "secrets" in Zero to One, he's referring to truths you hold that aren't (yet) generally accepted.

> What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

> Recall the business version of our contrarian question: what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world‐changing companies yet to be started.

The text of that chapter is on Genius: http://genius.com/Peter-thiel-zero-to-one-chapter-8-secrets-...

[davidivadavid]

Yep. And presumably such secrets (or "ideas" for some value of the word "idea") are incredibly valuable.

Which, of course, is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to point it out.

That's the thing with "ideas don't matter, it's all about execution." It's either true by definition (every company has to execute something at some point to even exist), or incredibly shallow and wrong (as long as you execute something you'll get great results).

[tedmiston]

> Which, of course, is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to point it out.

It seems stupid to us, but I run into people every few weeks who "have the next big idea if only they can find a dev" but are hesitant to share more than a two-sentence pitch of fear that their coveted idea would get "stolen".

Fixed mindset vs growth mindset is still a battle for many people, especially (would be) first time non-technical founders.