Update: I messaged the author on mastodon and have a link to the post. See below.
There’s a blog post I read around the turn of the century that’s stayed with me over the years. It was written by Andre Torrez, and was about how ideas are worthless in themselves. I’ve tried to find it a couple of times, but the only trace remaining is a section quoted on another blog.
…that’s what’s got me so bothered about people musing in their weblogs about projects they’d like to do. Stop talking about it and just build it. Don’t make it too complicated. Don’t spend so much time planning on events that will never happen. Programmers, good programmers, are known for over-engineering to save time later down the road. The problem is that you can over-engineer yourself out of wanting to do the site…
That fragment doesn’t really demonstrate why this post proved so powerful to me. The rest of the post talked about how cheap ideas are. An idea that can be easily replicated has little worth – the value is in the execution. Founding up a start-up based on only an idea is pointless if someone with more money can reproduce and grow it faster than you ever could.
I spent a lot of time at technologies meet-ups, and sometimes you’d meet people who had their one big idea. And they’d refuse to discuss details because they didn’t want you ripping it off. But if their idea’s only strength was that nobody else knew it, then maybe it wasn’t all that valuable.
Update: I realised I’d never messaged Andre Torrez about the post and they found it on the wayback machine. The post is as good as I remember.