Note to entrepreneurs: Your idea is not special

This point has been beaten into the ground so hard that I don't even know where in the backlast/forelash cycle we are with it anymore.

Google's idea wasn't "search engine", it was "page rank", which gave damn good query results. But some people have it in their best interest to trivialize any idea, so I expect them to do this.

"Note to entrepreneurs: Your idea is not special"

Note to author: what you said has been said before.

Now, so what?

This idea, like the other comments said, has been beaten to death so much I am not sure why its still a discussion. I mean its common sense that the idea is less important than the execution. If we created companies off ideas alone we would have flying cars or time travel. Obviously this is an exaggeration and on the far end but its true. Every idea is a branch of something else, every idea is a combination of two other ideas. Every idea that you come up with may not be unique but what the idea actually indicates, and this is something Paul Graham said himself is the idea is a sign of the entrepreneurs intelligence. I believe thats true the idea should be viewed just as that, a sign of the thought process and the way they look at the work because I myself know that the initial idea I create is not the idea that I have three days from now. Idea's constantly evolve just organically in life and with different interactions you have which give way to even better ideas. The idea is not what wins its the ability to have a coherent and good idea and continue evolving with it. "Your idea is not special" is true because we as humans are for the most part not original creatures and our inspiration comes from other things but what is special is the way you continue to evolve the idea and how you take new ideas that you have and meld them into your original idea. Pandora is a great example, they did not start out as a internet radio company but as the music genome project and overtime changed focus to what they are today.

I beg to differ. My time tracking app is revolutionary.

But that's okay, because entrepreneurs themselves are special. Otherwise, everyone would be one.

But I don't believe this article anyhow. Sure, Google wasn't the first search engine... But they sure did it better than the others at the time.

And likewise, every idea could be the same. Get all the little factors right and you could be the next big tech thing.

Or you could fail miserably.

Brad Feld wants the next Facebook to send him an email saying "We're building a social network that will eventually provide a social infrastructure to all websites, and we're going to start by building a clean-looking MySpace with photo sharing and flirting functionality, limited to colleges, and rolling out starting with the most prestigious colleges."

As a reasonably competent programmer with no good ideas for a start-up, these sorts of articles piss me off.

Linkbait title, but good post. He's right. Ideas only matter when moving beyond the idea phase. Too many people sit on a "big idea" waiting for some hidden force to propel them to action, while hackers find a way to get a prototype built.

It's statistically probable that the major part of the ideas are not special, but there are special ideas. We can look at the past and see many great ideas with excelent results. Try in science discoveries first.

Oh, for goodness' sake. We know. Stories like this need to just go away.