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The whole idea/execution riff is reductionist. Some ideas are more or less obvious. Twitter is a great example: there was basically no idea, it was all executio

The whole idea/execution riff is reductionist. Some ideas are more or less obvious. Twitter is a great example: there was basically no idea, it was all execution and marketing. But other ideas are huge. Larry and Sergey's idea of how to index the web was genuinely novel. The best team in the world could have executed on pre-Google search tech and would have got nowhere. It all depends on the idea: some are just so much better than others...

amichail 17y ago
Twitter's idea is not obvious. Why would restricting blog entries to 140 characters result in a new and very interesting phenomenon? Larry and Sergey's PageRank isn't a new application level idea (as search engines already existed) but rather a better implementation of an existing application level idea.
- hymanroth 17y ago
  Twitter's key insight was to extend a blogging platform to mobile phones (hence the 140 limit). It was definitely innovative and smart, but not the kind of thing they give out Nobel prizes for. I think the Google boys' idea went much deeper, and their indexing methods were completely novel at the time, hence much more relevant results.
  - amichail 17y ago
    Maybe they didn't foresee what this would do if they were concerned mostly about mobile phones at the time. Perhaps you could say that twitter is an accidental success that is much more interesting than the original vision.
  - raphar 17y ago
    Google's way of indexing was not novel at the time. There were others that used the same methods. Their execution on the other hand was flawless.
    - hymanroth 17y ago
      Well, that's a matter of opinion. From what I have read, their method was innovative, hence the patents. The problem with working this kind of stuff out is that history is always biased towards the winners (in the sense that nobody talks about the losers). With that it mind, you could quite possibly be right.
      - redorb 17y ago
        If not their methods - their hardware was definitely a new thought at that time - Low cost commodity hardware etc; when it was cool to spend 10k on a server,
- antiismist 17y ago
  The 140 character feature is definitely an execution issue and not an idea issue. It wasn't part of the original design, they iterated their way to that. "@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded. Back then, we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message." http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/ http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born...
Alex3917 17y ago
Part of the reason the whole 'ideas don't matter' meme is BS is because the word 'idea' has more than one definition. 1) idea: A mental model of the way something works, has worked, or could work in the future. (e.g. page rank) 2) idea: A plan. (e.g. Twitter sponsoring SxSw) (I realize the two senses of the word are related, but for our purposes they are functionally distinct.) Anyway, good ideas of both types can create value, but they do so in completely different ways and require completely different resources, strategies, and tactics to execute. In any case the entire concept of starting a business around an idea is stupid to begin with. Twitter and Google aren't the result of a good idea, they're the result of thousands of good ideas, a sufficient quantity of which were executed well enough to keep the lights on. Real business people don't start with a business idea, they start with an asset they want to capture, and then come up with several dozen ideas for capturing that asset and then pick the best ones to push through the dip.
- ph0rque 17y ago
  In any case the entire concept of starting a business around an idea is stupid to begin with. Twitter and Google aren't the result of a good idea, they're the result of thousands of good ideas, a sufficient quantity of which were executed well enough to keep the lights on. Real business people don't start with a business idea, they start with an asset they want to capture, and then come up with several dozen ideas for capturing that asset and then pick the best ones to push through the dip. Perhaps a stupid question: what do you mean by asset in this case?
  - Alex3917 17y ago
    >Perhaps a stupid question: what do you mean by asset in this case? An asset is a resource that you create which you can later harvest for money. For example, let's say you are an event promoter. In this case your asset is your mailing list, because having a list of 300k people willing to read about your events allows you to go to night clubs and ask for $20k in exchange for sending out a blast to your followers. So once you decide that the asset you are creating is the list of people willing to hear about your events, there are any number of ways you can go about creating this list. You can sign people up who go to events, run contests, find local people on twitter and start conversations with them, create a website and run google ads to get people to it, etc. The point is that smart entrepreneurs don't start with ideas, because ideas usually fail and once they fail you're fucked. Rather, they come up with an asset they know is valuable, and then come up with 50 ways to build that asset, knowing that some of them will fail. This way even if some of your ideas are only hit 10% of your target goal for growing the asset, at least you spent that time growing an asset that you can monetize in the future and you don't have to start all over. Business ideas are for chumps.

amichail 17y ago

Twitter's idea is not obvious. Why would restricting blog entries to 140 characters result in a new and very interesting phenomenon? Larry and Sergey's PageRank isn't a new application level idea (as search engines already existed) but rather a better implementation of an existing application level idea.

hymanroth 17y ago
Twitter's key insight was to extend a blogging platform to mobile phones (hence the 140 limit). It was definitely innovative and smart, but not the kind of thing they give out Nobel prizes for. I think the Google boys' idea went much deeper, and their indexing methods were completely novel at the time, hence much more relevant results.
- amichail 17y ago
  Maybe they didn't foresee what this would do if they were concerned mostly about mobile phones at the time. Perhaps you could say that twitter is an accidental success that is much more interesting than the original vision.
- raphar 17y ago
  Google's way of indexing was not novel at the time. There were others that used the same methods. Their execution on the other hand was flawless.
  - hymanroth 17y ago
    Well, that's a matter of opinion. From what I have read, their method was innovative, hence the patents. The problem with working this kind of stuff out is that history is always biased towards the winners (in the sense that nobody talks about the losers). With that it mind, you could quite possibly be right.
    - redorb 17y ago
      If not their methods - their hardware was definitely a new thought at that time - Low cost commodity hardware etc; when it was cool to spend 10k on a server,
antiismist 17y ago
The 140 character feature is definitely an execution issue and not an idea issue. It wasn't part of the original design, they iterated their way to that. "@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded. Back then, we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message." http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/ http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born...

Alex3917 17y ago

Part of the reason the whole 'ideas don't matter' meme is BS is because the word 'idea' has more than one definition. 1) idea: A mental model of the way something works, has worked, or could work in the future. (e.g. page rank) 2) idea: A plan. (e.g. Twitter sponsoring SxSw) (I realize the two senses of the word are related, but for our purposes they are functionally distinct.) Anyway, good ideas of both types can create value, but they do so in completely different ways and require completely different resources, strategies, and tactics to execute. In any case the entire concept of starting a business around an idea is stupid to begin with. Twitter and Google aren't the result of a good idea, they're the result of thousands of good ideas, a sufficient quantity of which were executed well enough to keep the lights on. Real business people don't start with a business idea, they start with an asset they want to capture, and then come up with several dozen ideas for capturing that asset and then pick the best ones to push through the dip.

ph0rque 17y ago
In any case the entire concept of starting a business around an idea is stupid to begin with. Twitter and Google aren't the result of a good idea, they're the result of thousands of good ideas, a sufficient quantity of which were executed well enough to keep the lights on. Real business people don't start with a business idea, they start with an asset they want to capture, and then come up with several dozen ideas for capturing that asset and then pick the best ones to push through the dip. Perhaps a stupid question: what do you mean by asset in this case?
- Alex3917 17y ago
  >Perhaps a stupid question: what do you mean by asset in this case? An asset is a resource that you create which you can later harvest for money. For example, let's say you are an event promoter. In this case your asset is your mailing list, because having a list of 300k people willing to read about your events allows you to go to night clubs and ask for $20k in exchange for sending out a blast to your followers. So once you decide that the asset you are creating is the list of people willing to hear about your events, there are any number of ways you can go about creating this list. You can sign people up who go to events, run contests, find local people on twitter and start conversations with them, create a website and run google ads to get people to it, etc. The point is that smart entrepreneurs don't start with ideas, because ideas usually fail and once they fail you're fucked. Rather, they come up with an asset they know is valuable, and then come up with 50 ways to build that asset, knowing that some of them will fail. This way even if some of your ideas are only hit 10% of your target goal for growing the asset, at least you spent that time growing an asset that you can monetize in the future and you don't have to start all over. Business ideas are for chumps.