> The best companies start out with ideas that don’t sound very good. They start out as projects, and in fact sometimes they sound so inconsequential the founders wouldn't let themselves work on them if they had to defend them as a company. Google and Yahoo started as grad students’ projects. Facebook was a project Zuckerberg built while he was a sophomore in college. Twitter was a side project that started with a single engineer inside a company doing something totally different. Airbnb was a side project to make some money to afford rent. They all became companies later.

This is hardly a list of the best companies, and a few of them don't support the argument:

1. The search/portal market was already significant when Google launched. Companies like Yahoo, Excite, Lycos were already public traded at the time, and were some of the hottest issues in the tech space. So it's no wonder Andy Bechtolsheim cut Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000 before a corporate entity even existed.

2. When Facebook launched, Friendster already had millions of users and had received a $30 million acquisition offer from Google. MySpace, which was created by people who saw Friendster's popularity, was founded by people trying to capitalize on the social networking hype that was already present in 2003.

3. Even Airbnb is hardly a post child for Sam's argument. Homeaway, VRBO and Couchsurfing were all well established when Airbnb launched.

For most entrepreneurs, "start out with an idea that doesn't sound very good" isn't likely to turn out very good.