Ask YC: Do you have a brother/sister also in computing who disagrees with you about what's important?
In my case, I focus on novel ideas. My brother is the exact opposite: he is concerned with high quality implementation of existing ideas.
I guess you could argue that Google's process itself was the novel idea -- that Yahoo and Altavista hadn't thought of link-counting and algorithm's and thus the novel idea is what allowed for Google's success.
But then you might be getting into a semantics game.
Or maybe this means you're both right.
Maybe it's time I let somebody else comment.
the questions is, is he willing to wait and do some quick and dirty impletepemtions just to test the ideas and then do the real thing.
and the questions for you is how sure are you of you novel ideas? it could become costly because eventualy you will have to improve the quality or someone else like google might take it from you and develop it better