Ideas are cheap for a reason
Founders guard ideas as if they were the valuable part. The history of the last few years suggests the valuable part is almost everything that comes after.
Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.
Guy Kawasaki has used this line for years, including as the title of a 2004 magazine column and in his book The Art of the Start, published the same year. He came to it from two directions. As Apple’s evangelist for the Macintosh in the 1980s he watched a good idea succeed only because a team spent years making it work. As a venture investor since then he has heard thousands of pitches, and most of the ideas in them were not new.
The practical consequence is about secrecy. First-time founders often ask investors to sign non-disclosure agreements, or refuse to describe their idea for fear it will be stolen. Kawasaki’s view, shared by most investors, is that the fear is misplaced. Anyone good enough to steal the idea and build it well has ideas of their own, and describing an idea widely brings back feedback that is worth far more than secrecy.
Social networking is the recent proof. Friendster had the idea early in the decade and briefly had the attention that came with it. Its site became slow as it grew, and users drifted to MySpace, which let them customize their pages. Facebook, which started later still at a single university, grew carefully campus by campus and now leads. The idea was the same in all three. The results were decided by engineering, choices about growth and attention to what users did.
Implementation is mostly unglamorous. It means hiring the right first engineers, keeping the servers up when traffic spikes, pricing the product, answering support email and deciding every week which of fifty possible improvements comes first. None of that makes a good pitch, and all of it decides whether the company is still around in three years. Kawasaki’s own recent venture, Alltop, a site that gathers headlines by topic, entered a field with plenty of similar services, and whatever it achieves will come from how it is run rather than from the concept.
There are cases where the idea really is hard. Some products depend on an insight few people have: a new algorithm, a scientific result, a way of seeing a market that others miss. Choosing which idea to pursue is also a skill, and plenty of hard-working teams have implemented a poor idea excellently.
The line is best read as a correction to where founders spend their worry. Having an idea is the start. Everything that decides whether it matters happens afterwards.