[ccc3]

Can we please drop this hyperbolic platitude that "ideas are worthless." You need to have ideas. That's how you decide what to do. In the case that the author describes, your ideas will help you decide what type of "smart nerds" you need to find. After all, there are as many different types of nerds as there are topics to study in depth.

The real problem is thinking that you're just one big idea away from a successful company. A successful company is made up of thousands of ideas and many man-years of execution. The real value creation happens when you have infrastructure in place to separate the good ideas from the bad ones.

So it's true that a single untested idea isn't worth much, but a huge collection of validated ideas really is valuable.

[icandoitbetter]

Yeah, it's exactly because of the mentality of "ideas are worthless" that has dominated Silicon Valley that there's such a profound lack of imagination in today's technology world. It's perfectly fine to build things because they're "cool," and it's equally OK to follow the herd with some social analytics bullshit startup or an Instagram meets Path for Video type of thing, but know that when you want to do those things the idea is worthless not because ideas are worthless, but because that idea is worthless - and you can still be successful without a worthy idea.

[tjr]

We're quick to jump on ideas without implementation as being worthless, but is it because it's so nonsensical to have an implementation without an idea? If we could have such a thing, we'd probably deem that pretty worthless too: a software application that doesn't actually do anything in particular, just kind of meanders around, even if it's very well coded and documented.

[yesbabyyes]

That's called a framework!

[vannevar]

"It's not the idea, it's the execution" is the "it's not the heat, it's the humidity" of the startup world.

[mechanical_fish]

Yes, but complaining about this is like complaining about the cost and inconvenience of getting vaccinated for polio: If the cure seems worse than the disease, it might be because you don't clearly remember what the disease was like.

I assure you that however clued in we all are on HN, the OP is right: The notion of the "top-secret killer idea for a website" is alive and well outside of geek culture, having captured much of the aura surrounding its much older cousin, the "brilliant idea for a movie that will make me rich in Hollywood unless it gets STOLEN". As a web-publishing consultant I had several people ask me to sign NDAs in the first half hour of the sales process, sometimes before they would even tell me why they called, because they were terribly frightened that their brilliant concept ("It's a review site. For local hobby shops. On the internet.") was going to get "stolen" by someone who would go on to reap the millions that were rightfully theirs.

[getsat]

I like Derek Sivers' approach: http://sivers.org/multiply

[anamax]

> a huge collection of validated ideas really is valuable

What definition of "validated ideas" are we using?

My definition is "customers are spending real money on product".

There are other valuable points before that occurs but they're less valuable and much of the "value add" to get to that point consists of design and development, not biz dev, deals, and so on.