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"Ideas are worth nothing." While it is seen here regularly -- and is always strangely given a pass -- this remains the most profoundly meaningless, if not outr

"Ideas are worth nothing." While it is seen here regularly -- and is always strangely given a pass -- this remains the most profoundly meaningless, if not outright stupid, thing that anyone in this industry can mutter.

car 13y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. If this were true, we wouldn't need a patent system.
- hobb0001 13y ago
  Arguably, the patent system is about execution, not ideas. Science fiction authors have been providing cool ideas for free for some time now.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  Patents don't cover ideas, they cover implementations of those ideas.
  - corresation 13y ago
    There are patents on time machines and those that break the laws of thermodynamics. Because many patents lies at an abstract cross road midway between idea and execution.
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      The patents are still on proposed implementations, not on the idea itself.
pcrh 13y ago
I'd have to agree with you. The problem is that good ideas (i.e. groundbreaking,implementable and profitable) are as rare as hen's teeth. Bad and so-so ideas are a dime a dozen.
jlgreco 13y ago
That is because the phrase is typically given in response to the self-proclaimed "big-idea business guy" who is pitching his idea to somebody that he expects to 1) implement it, 2) grovel at his feet for being given the great opportunity of implementing it. Not terribly applicable here... but at the same time not terribly irrelevant here either.
riggins 13y ago
this remains the most profoundly meaningless, if not outright stupid, thing that anyone in this industry can mutter. do you really not understand what this means? here's an awesome idea. A sensor and software that can read your brain waves so you don't need mouse or keyboard. Awesome idea, right? Worthless without the implementation.
- MAGZine 13y ago
  Here are 500 of the industry's most talented engineers, artists, HCI experts, etc, entirely yours, for 10 years. Worthless without a money-making proposition, which is, in many cases, the idea. if you've got money (and thus, talent), the idea is the most valuable part. good ideas might be valueless (though you could make a case to say this is also untrue), but they're definitely not worthless.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    If you have that much talent on hand, you don't need an idea, you can simply copy and out-compete existing players in existing markets. To call that worthless is to seriously misunderstand the nature of business.
    - Terretta 13y ago
      > simply Sure.
- corresation 13y ago
  Worthless without the implementation. Fertilizer is worthless. Without water nothing can grow. Gasoline is worthless. Without a spark it can't provide energy. A 50" LED 120Hz display is worthless. Without a signal to display it can't provide value. Are those meaningful or honest statements? Is it of any value for people to constantly parrot the nonsensical "parts of a whole are worthless" prattle? I fully understand what people think they mean when they trot it out, and that is why I think it is garbage. It is refuse being vomited online. Many of us are excellent software developers. Most of us bide our time developing projects for other people because we have no idea what to build ourselves. Many of the profoundly valuable changes in our industry have come because someone had an idea that was different and ended up changing the world. Yes, of course the execution mattered. But without the idea the execution would be worthless. So where does that leave us? Some sort of nihilist everything is worthless depression?
debt 13y ago
Ideas are worth nothing. Ideas have a mental effect, but execution still has tangible results. I could just do something, literally anything, and me, having done a thing, would be worth way more than me, having an idea. Many people have great ideas, few people have the balls or resources to actually execute them and make them worth something. Just a thought.
- jessedhillon 13y ago
  I could just do something, literally anything, and me, having done a thing, would be worth way more than me, having an idea. The overall claim has some limited merits, but don't overstate the case. You generating an idea in your seat about a site that, say, scrapes some public resource and presents in a useful way, are more valuable than the you who uses that same time to make yourself a sandwich. And the ideas you can have -- ideas which you can only execute after having the ideas themselves -- are of a higher quality than someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources. Your ideas are more valuable because they are informed by a more nuanced knowledge of how things actually get done. Or to put another way, if you were approached at a party about an opportunity to work on someone's seed of a project, would you rather that person be an engineer or a fast food employee? No offense to fast food workers, but the engineer has more, and more salient, skills when it comes to this question. The idea can't be cashed in until it's executed, and an executed idea is superior to an unexecuted one, but in choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    You're missing the point. People usually have that brilliant idea about an useful service while making a sandwich. If you don't act on it, it's worth nothing regardless. > someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources Unless you are a scholar at the very top of your field, there are thousands other people with the same background and resources as you, or better. A good chunk of them will have had the exact same ideas, plus a thousand variations. A handful will actually do something. > choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones The act of choosing is the beginning of execution, and is way harder and more valuable than generating ideas.
nhebb 13y ago
I've heard John Doerr echo "Ideas are worth nothing", and I think the phrase is born out of the VC mindset. From their perspective ideas are actually worth nothing. They need to see execution and traction. But from the perspective of an entrepreneur or an established business, ideas are valuable.
defen 13y ago
The missing two words there are "without execution", and it's true, not "profoundly meaningless", especially in this industry. Hell, this is the industry that invented "worse is better".
film42 13y ago
I agree that saying,"Ideas are worth nothing" is kind of weak, and I'd like to explain why. Ideas are cheap and contagious, execution is expensive and risky. When I think about the concept of an "idea" vs "execution," I think about the youtube, vimeo, blip, etc sprint. Each company had relatively the same idea--video on the internet--but no number of analysts could've predicted that youtube would be the outright success of the lot. All of them had excellent execution, but it's always risky, and for youtube, it paid off.
notJim 13y ago
Wholeheartedly agree here, and I applaud you for saying it. I think I've had in the back of my mind somewhere that "Ideas are worthless" is bullshit, but reading your comment and the ones you made later really solidified that thought for me.
bcoates 13y ago
How so? It's a testable factual statement about the world. Things are worth what someone's willing to pay for them, and the market value of a good idea is within a rounding error of nothing. It's not like it's impossible to sell an idea, and the world is full of self-styled idea men who are happy to do so, but buyers are thin on the ground.

car 13y ago

I wholeheartedly agree. If this were true, we wouldn't need a patent system.

hobb0001 13y ago
Arguably, the patent system is about execution, not ideas. Science fiction authors have been providing cool ideas for free for some time now.
gnaritas 13y ago
Patents don't cover ideas, they cover implementations of those ideas.
- corresation 13y ago
  There are patents on time machines and those that break the laws of thermodynamics. Because many patents lies at an abstract cross road midway between idea and execution.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    The patents are still on proposed implementations, not on the idea itself.

pcrh 13y ago

I'd have to agree with you. The problem is that good ideas (i.e. groundbreaking,implementable and profitable) are as rare as hen's teeth. Bad and so-so ideas are a dime a dozen.

jlgreco 13y ago

That is because the phrase is typically given in response to the self-proclaimed "big-idea business guy" who is pitching his idea to somebody that he expects to 1) implement it, 2) grovel at his feet for being given the great opportunity of implementing it. Not terribly applicable here... but at the same time not terribly irrelevant here either.

riggins 13y ago

this remains the most profoundly meaningless, if not outright stupid, thing that anyone in this industry can mutter. do you really not understand what this means? here's an awesome idea. A sensor and software that can read your brain waves so you don't need mouse or keyboard. Awesome idea, right? Worthless without the implementation.

MAGZine 13y ago
Here are 500 of the industry's most talented engineers, artists, HCI experts, etc, entirely yours, for 10 years. Worthless without a money-making proposition, which is, in many cases, the idea. if you've got money (and thus, talent), the idea is the most valuable part. good ideas might be valueless (though you could make a case to say this is also untrue), but they're definitely not worthless.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  If you have that much talent on hand, you don't need an idea, you can simply copy and out-compete existing players in existing markets. To call that worthless is to seriously misunderstand the nature of business.
  - Terretta 13y ago
    > simply Sure.
corresation 13y ago
Worthless without the implementation. Fertilizer is worthless. Without water nothing can grow. Gasoline is worthless. Without a spark it can't provide energy. A 50" LED 120Hz display is worthless. Without a signal to display it can't provide value. Are those meaningful or honest statements? Is it of any value for people to constantly parrot the nonsensical "parts of a whole are worthless" prattle? I fully understand what people think they mean when they trot it out, and that is why I think it is garbage. It is refuse being vomited online. Many of us are excellent software developers. Most of us bide our time developing projects for other people because we have no idea what to build ourselves. Many of the profoundly valuable changes in our industry have come because someone had an idea that was different and ended up changing the world. Yes, of course the execution mattered. But without the idea the execution would be worthless. So where does that leave us? Some sort of nihilist everything is worthless depression?

debt 13y ago

Ideas are worth nothing. Ideas have a mental effect, but execution still has tangible results. I could just do something, literally anything, and me, having done a thing, would be worth way more than me, having an idea. Many people have great ideas, few people have the balls or resources to actually execute them and make them worth something. Just a thought.

jessedhillon 13y ago
I could just do something, literally anything, and me, having done a thing, would be worth way more than me, having an idea. The overall claim has some limited merits, but don't overstate the case. You generating an idea in your seat about a site that, say, scrapes some public resource and presents in a useful way, are more valuable than the you who uses that same time to make yourself a sandwich. And the ideas you can have -- ideas which you can only execute after having the ideas themselves -- are of a higher quality than someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources. Your ideas are more valuable because they are informed by a more nuanced knowledge of how things actually get done. Or to put another way, if you were approached at a party about an opportunity to work on someone's seed of a project, would you rather that person be an engineer or a fast food employee? No offense to fast food workers, but the engineer has more, and more salient, skills when it comes to this question. The idea can't be cashed in until it's executed, and an executed idea is superior to an unexecuted one, but in choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  You're missing the point. People usually have that brilliant idea about an useful service while making a sandwich. If you don't act on it, it's worth nothing regardless. > someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources Unless you are a scholar at the very top of your field, there are thousands other people with the same background and resources as you, or better. A good chunk of them will have had the exact same ideas, plus a thousand variations. A handful will actually do something. > choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones The act of choosing is the beginning of execution, and is way harder and more valuable than generating ideas.

nhebb 13y ago

I've heard John Doerr echo "Ideas are worth nothing", and I think the phrase is born out of the VC mindset. From their perspective ideas are actually worth nothing. They need to see execution and traction. But from the perspective of an entrepreneur or an established business, ideas are valuable.

defen 13y ago

The missing two words there are "without execution", and it's true, not "profoundly meaningless", especially in this industry. Hell, this is the industry that invented "worse is better".

film42 13y ago

I agree that saying,"Ideas are worth nothing" is kind of weak, and I'd like to explain why. Ideas are cheap and contagious, execution is expensive and risky. When I think about the concept of an "idea" vs "execution," I think about the youtube, vimeo, blip, etc sprint. Each company had relatively the same idea--video on the internet--but no number of analysts could've predicted that youtube would be the outright success of the lot. All of them had excellent execution, but it's always risky, and for youtube, it paid off.

notJim 13y ago

Wholeheartedly agree here, and I applaud you for saying it. I think I've had in the back of my mind somewhere that "Ideas are worthless" is bullshit, but reading your comment and the ones you made later really solidified that thought for me.

bcoates 13y ago

How so? It's a testable factual statement about the world. Things are worth what someone's willing to pay for them, and the market value of a good idea is within a rounding error of nothing. It's not like it's impossible to sell an idea, and the world is full of self-styled idea men who are happy to do so, but buyers are thin on the ground.