There is a cultural fiction in SV that gets repeated that “ideas are worthless”. Folks also love to say “execution is everything.” Keep in mind, this idea ten

There is a cultural fiction in SV that gets repeated that “ideas are worthless”. Folks also love to say “execution is everything.” Keep in mind, this idea tends to favor capital and insitutionalized power. Executing a bad idea isn’t valuable and can cost you lots of money, time and opportunity. Since most companies fail to make a profit, I suppose we could argue that most execution is worthless too. So ideas can be seen as an exponent of sorts. An idea with a greater than 0 value will be useful for a team that can execute. Execution being equal, ideas are everything. But not only that, the people and contexts that create great ideas are even more valueable. Creativity is a resource that is always needed. Uncreative people don’t like this at all, so they often try to devalue the power of ideas. Of course they are also the ones who will try to execute on them. Smart people understand the value of both. They also understand their own worth. They don’t need to devalue or belittle others in order to create partnerships. There are plenty of brilliant idea generators who are paid handsomely simply for generating ideas and licensing them to existing companies.