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I'd like to add a couple things to this:

1. This is the 'gatekeeper' problem. You have a handful of people deciding if you're making "what people want". They can't possibly know what all people want. JK Rowling got rejected by, what, 20 publishers? They can't know. They can only do their best. The 'gatekeeper' problem also means you get idiosyncrasies, such as (essentially) a ban on single founders, etc.

2. Some ideas are easy to pitch, others nearly impossible. Take this year's Best Film Oscar winner, "Slumdog Millionaire", and try to pitch the plot in a way that's not ludicrous. You won't succeed. But take any cheesy, crappy B-flick and you can perfectly summarize it and even make it sound good. Now, I'm not saying there's a correlation between a good idea and difficulty in pitching it. (Ok, but I will say there's a clear correlation between mediocre ideas and ease of pitch.) So if you didn't get accepted, your idea either isn't very good or it's great.

1 comments

(Ok, but I will say there's a clear correlation between mediocre ideas and ease of pitch.)

yeah, "index all of the world's information" is such a mediocre idea, even though it is a very easy pitch, those Google guys will never make any money.

I upvoted you but I disagree wholeheartedly with your google invocation: No, Larry and Sergey never expected their startup to become what it is today. Your small-step success feeds into your ambition; it's one they nailed search that they have started to visualize bigger and bigger success, then execute it.

and yet just because they nailed it - still doesn't mean it was a bad idea...

There are plenty of bad ideas that are executed well and don't succeed. There are plenty of good ideas that are executed poorly and succeed anyway.

The point isn't how they executed, it really was a reflection on the david927's assertion that there is a correlation between ease of pitch and how good an idea is, is wrong, plain and simple.

"our site is like facebook meets digg" is an easy pitch (I've actually heard this from someone), and in my humble opinion, is a bad idea

"we want to index all of the world's information" is an easy pitch, and so happens to be a good idea.

You all got it wrong. Here's what I said:

- There is no correlation between a good idea and how hard or easy it is to pitch. Some great ideas are easy to pitch, others are not. No correlation.

- There is a direct correlation between a mediocre idea and ease in pitching it. Every mediocre idea is easy to pitch.