Another element to consider is that sometimes very detailed, thought-out plans are often actually less valuable than tentative, raw ideas. Elaborate plans are

Another element to consider is that sometimes very detailed, thought-out plans are often actually less valuable than tentative, raw ideas. Elaborate plans are brittle because there are many dependencies interwoven into them. Another way of putting that is that there are a lot of implicit assumptions about how the final system will work. But the reality is that there are things that will be unanticipated developments during the actual construction. Some of these will be things that in hindsight should have been anticipated, and others will be things that it really isn't possible to anticipate. In other words, we only really learn what the plan should look like by building. Building gives us crucial elements of the plan. But there is another essential piece as well. And that is that one person can only figure out so much of how something complicated enough to be valuable should work. This is part of why YC wants multiple co-founders rather than single founders. It's also where you want to get feedback loops working in your favor. So much of life is about feedback loops, whether it is body temperature, or social confidence, or addictive dependencies. You want to get feedback from other people, and the way to do it isn't to show them your ideas, it's to show them the built out manifestation of your ideas, for exactly the reasons in the paragraph above. One of the many things that makes this startup thing interesting is that for 500 years, specialization has been a trend. Since you only have a few guys in a startup ... Finally, in terms of working on the skills, why not work on skills by trying to build a straight-forward aspect of one of the simpler ideas? And if this isn't possible because of the nature of the ideas, then the ideas need to evolve to make this possible.