Former stealth moder here.<p>I really liked your essay and I appreciate that someone is pushing back against the &#x27;ideas are cheap&#x27; meme. I think you were really smart to make the first item be that an idea which you cannot execute is a bad idea for a startup.<p>However, I think that your essay left out one really important thing: what people mean when they say &#x27;idea&#x27;.  It&#x27;s helpful to unwrap what we mean when we say &#x27;idea&#x27; so that we can distinguish between the two different cases of value: &#x27;it&#x27;s only an idea&#x27; vs. &#x27;an idea that can change the world&#x27;.  I think that the disconnect between the &#x27;ideas are cheap&#x27; crowd and the &#x27;ideas are valuable&#x27; crowd is that they don&#x27;t mean exactly the same thing when they say &#x27;idea&#x27;.  And knowing the difference not only means that you can speak someone else&#x27;s language, it also means that you can see how to add value to your ideas.<p>Whether it is a business idea, product idea, or invention idea, the level of vagueness affects how much value it has.  There is a difference between 1) an idea for a product, 2) an idea for the basis of how it works, and 3) a complete set of code or blueprints for making one.  &#x27;Execution&#x27; is largely what we call going from step 2 to 3, but both step 1 and step 2 get called ideas. Even step 2.5, where something is not fully executed but the details have been worked out, gets called an idea.<p>I&#x27;d love to see more about how adding specificity adds value, but only if it is correct.  Taking a great idea (say, the diesel engine) and making a poor implementation of it (building a really crappy diesel engine) doesn&#x27;t take value away from the earlier steps of the idea (someone else can build a better one).  So, ideas start with little value, but get more value as more correct specificity is added.