Michael Pastko

LOL

Q: Why are startup ideas worthless? In his essay Ideas for Startups, Paul Graham wrote: “startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.” Steve Jobs expands on this idea further: “There’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product” A lot of people think that a really great idea is 90% of the work, but a great product idea will never turn out as originally conceived. You learn a lot from the details of building it and there are always tradeoffs you have to make. In this clip, Jobs tells the story of how a widowed man showed him a rock tumbler when he was little kid. He uses the rock tumbler and process of turning common stones into beautifully polished rocks as a metaphor for a team working really hard on something they're passionate about: "It's through the team--through a group of incredibly talented people--bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together... they polish each other and polish the ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones." The key to building a great product is a great team, not a great idea.