Are ideas worthless?

Link: Paul Buchheit: Ideas vs Judgment and Execution: Climbing the Mountain. Paul does a nice job here of shedding some light on recent conversations of interest regarding startups. But additional light is shed by some of the commentary. Why? Because perhaps what Paul was commenting on was what others "said, but not what they meant." Huh? That is, to understand what is said, you often have to understand the context. Take away the context and the words have less (or no) meaning.

This is similar to understanding a line of cases that help shape important precedent. You must understand the entire line to understand what is being "said"--reading the cases in isolation will not produce the right understanding. You have to follow the "linked list" up and down to get the context.

Case law represents an abstracted communications system (a language). Studying the law is like studying a foreign language, except it is written in English, which makes it "doubly confusing." The is true of the online universe as well, unless you are immersed in the context you don't "get" what is being said.

Old school executives are hopelessly out of touch because they have not mastered the new language. Learning a new language is tough. It is probably the most complex and important technology that man has ever invented (of course that might be given man too much credit but I will have to leave that for another post).