I’ve been reading How to get rich again recently and there’s one thing I would like to share. This topic has been discussed on startup-blogosphere thousands of times. Idea vs. execution. See what Felix has got to say:

The problem with the great idea is that it concentrates the mind on the idea itself. This is fine as far as it goes. But unless the idea is executed efficiently and with panache and originality, then it doesn’t matter how great the idea is, the enterprise will fail. Ideas are certainly of immense importance, but I have seen so many people attempting to create a start-up company who have become obsessed with proving that their idea was “right” rather than obsessed with making money. And  I have watched them wasting years doing it.

An excerpt from Forbes interview with Felix Dennis:

JB: So much entrepreneurial activity revolves around technology, but you have a reputation as a Luddite.

FD: I have never sent an e-mail and don’t know how to do so, and I will never learn. About 70% of e-mails are ass-covering. People send them to one another so they can say, “Oh, but I told you.” Nor do I own any portable communication devices. I don’t want anyone to know where I am. It’s none of their business.

I love the following story from “On the Edge. The spectacular Rise and Fall of COMMODORE.” I love it, because startups are all about effectiveness. And this one shows that often you gotta play beyond standards to achieve goals.

The microprocessor would be useless to engineers without documentation. Peddle recalls, “We were coming down to launching, and my buddy [Petr Sehnal] kept telling me, ‘Chuck, you’ve got to go write these manuals.’ I kept saying, ‘Yeah, I’ll get around to it.’” Peddle did not get around to it.

With Wescon rapidly approaching, and no manual in sight, Sehnal approached John Pavinen and told him, “He’s not doing it.”

“John Pavinen walked into my office with a security guard, and he walked me out of the building,” recalls Peddle.

According to Peddle, Pavinen gave him explicit instructions. “The only person you’re allowed to talk to in our company is your secretary, who you can dictate stuff to,” Pavinen told him. “You can’t come back to work until you finish the two manuals.”

Peddle accepted the situation with humility. “I wrote them under duress,” he says. Weeks later, Peddle emerged from his exile with his task completed. The 6502 would have manuals for Wescon.

An interesting read in Newsweek. I feel the same is happening in Poland, on a smaller scale of course. Young people, if they think about starting a startup at all (which is not too popular here since there are so many nicely paid corpo-jobs), they surely do not want to build deeply technological companies. What they want are silly websites offering weird services, fun.

I put all of them into “show-business” category. It’s like producing a tv show. OK, it may be popular for a few years, but it doesn’t sustain for decades.

I think people choose to build such startups for a few reasons:

1. it’s easy – you do not have to solve really difficult problems,
2. it’s fancy – you will get media coverage and be like a star,
3. it’s cheap,
4. you may be lucky and sell it, earn a quick buck and live a hipster life.

In Poland most of these new “startups” fall into this type. What’s worse, they’re often badly managed by people who don’t know how to build a good product, or at least a working one. I know what I’m talking about. After all I run a major polish startups database Powebkach.

It’s how I look at it, however I don’t feel to be the right person to judge and say what we should do about it. Maybe just let it go? The determined ones will eventually evolve and the others will find their cubes.