Execution

Chris Dixon had an important post over the weekend title The Idea Maze . He starts off with a very strong juxtaposition of thoughts around the importance of “the idea” to a startup. Ideas_Matter: The pop culture view of startups is that they’re all about coming up with a great product idea. ~Ideas_Matter: In response to this pop culture misconception, it has become popular in the startup community to say things like “execution is everything” and “ideas don’t matter”. ...

There is this magical moment that happens when a startup finally puts the key components together to build a successful business. After months or years of iterating and pivoting, they finally have the right product for the right market at the right price. At this point, the company has to shift gears and change their mindset a little. They need to stop looking for gold and start mining as fast as possible. My friend Chris Moody , President/COO at Gnip , refers to this as the execution phase of a business and there is no better example of execution in our current portfolio than the team at Gnip. ...

I heard a fascinating one-liner the other day that I had knee jerk negative reaction to but when I thought about it more thought was deeply insightful, especially in the context of big established companies vs. new entrepreneurial companies. A CEO of a very large, successful company said “execution is an order of magnitude easier than opportunity.” In the context of young startups, I often feel exactly the opposite. Opportunity is everywhere, but execution in a bitch. ...