Ideas not mattering is a psyop - Alexey Guzey

As these examples—Amazon, Google, Clubhouse—make clear, “execution being the constraint” doesn’t mean “ideas aren’t the constraint.” Even if the broad idea is “obvious” (online store, search engine, audio social media), successful execution requires having good “intermediate ideas” (starting with books for Amazon, PageRank for Google, the implement... See more

Conventional startup and business wisdom has become “there are plenty of good ideas, all that matters is execution.” We don’t buy it.

Good ideas are essential, even ones that seem obvious in retrospect were non-obvious ex ante, and in fact good execution itself depends critically on good ideas.

Despite us all wanting the world to be fair, meaning that hard work (execution) is the explanation we tend to gravitate towards naturally, having good new ideas that nobody’s ever had is actually very hard, is never guaranteed, and benefits from:KnowledgeIntelligenceNon-conformityTime to thinkCriticism of your ideasPart of the challenge is that the... See more

When we first went to write this section, Stephen started to write about how obvious Clubhouse was in retrospect. But then when pressed by Alexey, Stephen realized that while live audio on an app might be obvious, the other aspects of Clubhouse’s implementation—rooms, microphone privileges, hand-raising combined with elevation to the stage, innovat... See more

It’s easy to conflate ideas not guaranteeing success with them not mattering

Empirically, all our aspiring founder friends are desperate for startup ideas, with few managing to land on something worthwhile, and all our scientist friends are desperate for research ideas.

It’s extremely easy to forget how confusing or complex something seemed before you understood it.