While I'm happy discussing my "ideas" with most, I don't think discussing them on an open forum such as HN (entrepreneurs, coders, wannabe's, veterans, the lot) is a smart idea.
You wouldn't openly discuss a "oh my god I've just stumbled across x from Ycorp" tip on the trading floor tea room now, would you?
That aside, I do agree it adds an unnecessary level of pressure. You know, the thing is too, theres plenty more spaces out there.
There is a limit to this "ideas are worthless" theory. We don't talk about it enough. Instead we either treat all ideas as precious or all as worthless. The truth is much more nuanced than that.
I think people who are just getting started need to know and understand where to draw the line -- and more importantly that other people are already drawing the line in their public communications.
You are absolutely right. I used to be all about the ideas and think it was all about ideas, it'll be hard to explain here in few words but I think ideas are worthless up till a point.
Yeah, the startup process is heavily weighted towards execution, but if you have a stellar idea - and let me just say when I say "idea" I really mean "model" - then sure its got worth. If you know of a stone that nobody's overturned, and hell there's plenty of them you should sure as shit sit on it until you've got a flag ready that you can put in it.
But that only counts if its unique, if your going to build a "OMFG we have a startup that lets you post a 200 CHARACTER status about how what your eating makes you feel" then perhaps the idea might be "worthless" - because thats clearly a business that will make or break in its execution.
I think more generally ideas are worthless incite is not. If you think of Twitter in terms of message length you completely miss many reasons it was such a good idea. Twitter is a useful self-promotion tool for people who will promote it for free. Creating a public message stream large enough and companies will pay to listen in. Let third party's create interfaces and you don't need to pay to send SMS messages.
They could have build a vary different company using similar incites with a completely diffident idea and been just as successful, but realizing the cost of really large scale SMS messaging was not prohibitive was brilliant.
Isn't this sort of counter to open source and free software and the tools that many of us use daily? I mean half the tools we use are free and given away. Ruby, Linux, gcc, etc. What if the guys behind those projects never shared their ideas or gave things away for free? I mean it seems sort of hypocritical. I hope this doesn't come off as negative, but it just struck me that way.
That's the hell of the thing, as the article points out: you'll never know what you screwed up.
Yes, it'd be great if you could have 100 people all starting from the same point and everybody learning the lessons of what worked and what didn't because of total openness, but that's just not happening. Instead you'll get 2 or 3 survivors writing blog articles about how awesome their startup is without actually reporting anything at the level of detail you'd need to actually improve.
You wouldn't openly discuss a "oh my god I've just stumbled across x from Ycorp" tip on the trading floor tea room now, would you?
That aside, I do agree it adds an unnecessary level of pressure. You know, the thing is too, theres plenty more spaces out there.