"Is there really any debate whether you have to execute an idea to make it successful?" Mostly no. There are some cases where next to no 'execution' is needed

"Is there really any debate whether you have to execute an idea to make it successful?" Mostly no. There are some cases where next to no 'execution' is needed for the big bucks. One example was the Sears employee who proposed a button on the socket wrench that would eject the socket. His 'execution' was a lot of legal wrestling with Sears after they implemented the idea but didn't pay him. Eventually he got paid. "Are there really people who think you can have an idea, keep it in your head, and become rich just by thinking it?" No. "Ah, but the sage advice is to execute it 'correctly.'" I believe that more "sage" advice is to have a good idea where execution is routine! Here HN is trying really hard to get into a swamp and ignore the standard, old "sage" advice: (1) Identify some target customer 'pain'. Want a bad pain so that a solution is a "must have" instead of just a "nice to have" (I know, Facebook and Twitter are so far mostly only nice to have). (2) Find a solution to the pain. Hopefully this solution is new, much better than anything else, and can be protected. (3) Use the Sequoia statement: "A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower." I don't fully believe this, but it's not all wrong. It's a version of "Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door.", which is only partly true, also. Still, I didn't see a lot of Super Bowl ads for Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Here a crucial part, that I would call the valuable 'idea', is in (2), for the solution.