[credo]

Great illustration of the fact that ideas are generally not unique -- and that it is the execution that matters.

In one of his essays ( http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html), pg talked about the fact there was no such thing as a million-dollar idea and that "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."

[trominos]

I really think that this "only execution matters" thing is ridiculous.

Startup ideas are worthless in the sense that you're almost certainly not gonna be able to get anybody to pay you for one. If you want to prove that they're worthless in any other sense -- in particular, if you want to prove that you can't improve somebody's chances of succeeding in the startup world by giving them a good idea -- you have a lot of work to do. In fact, I bet you can't do it, because I don't think it's true.

Now, I have almost no experience in this area -- my conclusions are mostly a priori. But I don't think anybody else really does either, and in particular I don't think Paul has actually seen enough startups succeed or fail to judge the value of ideas. How many YC startups have "succeeded"? Depends on where you set the bar, but at this point in time the answer's somewhere between "not many" and "none".

And I'm kind of surprised that you're using this as an example of how idea doesn't matter; in my eyes, it's just the opposite. This succeeded because it was a great idea executed decently, not because it was a decent idea executed spectacularly.

[credo]

I'm not sure what you're trying to argue against. My first sentence said (a) "ideas are generally not unique" and (b) "it is the execution that matters"

I didn't discuss whether the execution was spectacular or not and I didn't discuss whether the idea was great or decent.

on (a), as a matter of fact, this thread proves that the idea was not unique on (b), as a matter of fact, the difference between the guy who had the idea and succeeded and the other guy who had the idea can be boiled down to one thing. I also suspect that hundreds of other people had the same idea. Again, what distinguished them from the guy who succeeded is simple. One guy executed, the other guys just had the idea, but didn't execute (either because they were incapable of execution or because they had other priorities ...)