Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

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This is one of his essays I vehemently disagree with, and think has hurt Silicon Valley. The idea that ideas and idea people are worthless has had a cascading effect of putting non idea people in idea people seats, or locking out a class of people from participating unless they have some other engineering or marketing or leadership skill. Apple would never have become without Steve Jobs being able to see what was and wasn’t a good idea.

An idea person doesn’t just have one good idea, and maybe one idea alone is worthless. Good ideas include good taste for scope, what is and isn’t needed for success.

Having an idea and handing it off to a startup is very different from having an idea and supervising it, keeping it on the rails. It’s almost crazy to me that an idea is worthless, but an entire startup without an idea is seen as potential.

As far as the AI floodgates, the world changed almost overnight, and we are just going to have to adapt to everyone having a calculator in their pocket, and that being good at using it is a more important skill than arithmetic. I’m not sure I’ve seen a technology adaption go from 0 to whatever percent we are at quite like this. It’s barrier to entry is so low, free to use, easy to use, easy to plug into old workflows, and somewhat undetectable by those not in the know. It would be wise to accept this new reality and start valuing prompt and editing skills instead of dismissing what part people “aren’t doing on their own.”

I usually say "ideas are a dime a dozen."

What I mean by this is that so many people starting tech businesses get really hung up on "protecting their idea" so it won't be "stolen" by others. But what makes an idea valuable isn't the idea, it's the execution. These people are worrying too much about the wrong thing.

I don't mean that ideas are worthless. Everything we create starts with an idea.

And this is where I disagree. The inability to execute on a good idea doesn’t mean that the idea creator isn’t the best person to shape the idea. The idea may be more than a one sentence pitch and instead an entire vision.

The one sentence summary of the idea may be a dime a dozen, but that’s only because the listener is discounting the rest of the idea as not having any value, or that the one sentence pitch is a common idea, and the rest of the vision is unique and special.

The team needs to be able to execute, not the individual. If an idea person is both good at creating a succession of ideas and discarding bad ideas, why shouldn’t that a) have worth and b) be respected enough that they are compensated for their talent. Don’t do for free…

I have a good 10+ fairly complex product ideas, that I don’t see envisioned elsewhere. If they are a dime a dozen, why don’t I see other people coming up with them? Are they bad ideas or are they unique ideas that maybe are special. Maybe we will never know. Maybe everyone who doesn’t have ideas wants to convince others their ideas are worthless so they give up and share them.

I don't think we actually disagree, honestly. I think we're just looking through different lenses.

> The idea may be more than a one sentence pitch and instead an entire vision.

Yes, the idea has to be fleshed out in order to be ready to start executing it.

I never meant to imply the idea creator wasn't the best person to do this, and I never meant to imply we were talking about an individual.

I think the ideas are worthless and a dime a dozen without execution has created a dismissive attitude. Everyone needs to be an engineer or lender to contribute.

Why would an engineer want to pair with somebody and “do all the work”?

Part of executing is looking at what features or decisions similar failure made, and righting the ship on the next go around.

Where is the idea person college course? MBA? Some kind of strategy?

The point I'm making with "dime a dozen" isn't to diminish the value of ideas, it's to stop people from valuing ideas above other things that are equally important.

I still don't think we disagree. But perhaps we're addressing different audiences. You are concerned with people who undervalue the role of idea developers, and I am concerned with addressing people who value the idea itself over the development of the idea.

I've seen many startups die because of getting that wrong.

> Part of executing is looking at what features or decisions similar failure made, and righting the ship on the next go around.

Yes, exactly so!

Sure, nurturing it to execution is a PM at the small scale and a CEO at the large scale. Ideas people are not competing with non-ideas people: they're competing with ideas people who can execute.

It's rather that developers don't want to work for idea people because they usually are not Steve Jobs, who is the exception to the rule.

And just like every profession there are idea people and people who think they are idea people. Unlike engineering, you can’t as easily make interview tests that pretend to be able to discern between those who are good at something and those that aren’t. Idea people are left to hitting a home run, succeeding and making a name for themselves. No one is going to hire a first timer into Chief Idea Officer.

Paul’s letter is a reason we don’t see more Jobs type people. Industry has been told to dismiss those who don’t do. Instead of finding a way to harness them.

Why isn’t the formula for a startup finding a Jobs and pairing them with a Woz? The idea that there are no more Jobs has almost become a self fulfilling mythology. Let’s see a bot write those two sentences on its own.

> Why isn’t the formula for a startup finding a Jobs and pairing them with a Woz?

Maybe because there are very few Jobses and Wozes around? And those that are, are probably working on their own startup.

I wouldn't lay blame on Paul's letter specifically.

I'll make the bold clain that there's no industry simply bereft of idea people who have no other function. Mainly because industry has almost no tolerance for people who have a great idea but no understanding of how to go about implementing it, even if that "go about implementing" is mainly having the leadership skills necessary to harangue, terrify, goad, or gingerly coax people who can do the implemeting to act as a cohesive group towards a common goal.

It's unrealistic to think there's any market for the "hey, here's a great idea!" person to receive a check for their brilliant statement and walk into the sunset. There are probably a great many "idea people" who wish that were the case and perhaps feel the world is unfair for this lack. Perhaps those are the kinds of people that the 1-800-Uinvent (or whatever it was) marketing scams preyed upon. Maybe the same group that wants to be the Jobs without putting in the work to be the Woz?

> And just like every profession there are idea people and people who think they are idea people.

This line makes your argument unfalsifiable, as if I bring any example of bad idea people, you could just state that they're not actually idea people but just people who think they are.

> Idea people are left to hitting a home run, succeeding and making a name for themselves. No one is going to hire a first timer into Chief Idea Officer.

Well yeah, I wouldn't hire a developer who hasn't developed anything either.

Well, to be fair and not to take anything away from his impact, but I wouldn't ever have wanted to work for Steve Jobs. We would have been far too incompatible.

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