Ideas Matter More Than Ever Before

Ability Alone Won't Save You
Gen-AI Makes Execution Cheap and Easy
Differentiation Comes from Great Ideas and Unique Customer Insight
What Entrepreneurs Need in the Gen AI Era
Welcome to the Era of Ideas

Ability Alone Won't Save You

For years, great entrepreneurs and inventors preached that execution beats ideas every time. That made sense when company-building required immense resources, specialized skills, and time. Today, generative AI has flipped this script, making execution accessible and affordable. Now, your real edge comes from powerful ideas and deep customer insights, not purely exceptional engineering, analytics, or design skills.

When I say execution, I'm talking about the raw ability to build high quality experiences quickly, usually characterized by strong engineering, design, and marketing skills. Perhaps the present day definition of execution should simply be the ability to refine and develop your idea as new information becomes available, not raw technical ability or business acumen.

As a technical founder, I'm adjusting to this reality as well. Take this essay from Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail. He claimed that startup success is a product of idea, judgement, ability, determination, and luck. I agree – but I'm finding that the proportional value of "ability" is eroding as compared to the other attributes.

Gen-AI Makes Execution Cheap and Easy

Thanks to generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude Sonnet, launching MVPs, building apps, and prototyping products has never been faster or cheaper. Small teams, and even individuals, can now deliver products in weeks or days, tasks that previously required fully staffed and dedicated engineering teams.

Startups like Cursor, reaching $100M in ARR with only ~20 people, and Lovable, hitting $17M ARR in months with just 15 people, are great examples. These companies have achieved great success on the back of truly great ideas, not necessarily raw technical ability. For example, two of Lovable's "great ideas" were to rename itself from GPT-Engineer to Lovable for a more memorable brand, and integrate with Supabase for a true full-stack AI developer. Strong execution can come from small, focused teams that don't need a ton of resources.

Differentiation Comes from Great Ideas and Unique Customer Insight

Execution is Now a Commodity – Ideas are the Real Advantage

With low execution barriers, differentiation is no longer purely about speed or technical skill. It's about how clearly you identify and solve important problems that the customer cares about. Of course, you could argue that understanding what customers actually care about is a key execution skill involving research, analytics, and strong intuition. But ultimately, AI tools are coming out to help founders with every step of this process (coding the application, analyzing user research transcripts, evaluating product usage, critiquing design, etc.). To stay ahead of the pack, entrepreneurs need to be inventive and come up with fresh, new ideas that stem from a deep, personal understanding of a key problem for a specific market.

Deep Customer Understanding Helps You With Judgement

This new era still demands deep empathy and precise understanding of customer pain points. That YC mantra hasn't changed. Companies that validate their ideas through genuine customer insight and communicate solutions clearly to their target customers will outpace those relying purely on technical expertise and execution. Founders who have experience dealing with a problem will be able to draw from that experience and make better decisions about what the right solution should look like.

Here are a few ways to deepen your understanding:

Interview your users, relentlessly.
Build communities for your customers to talk to and learn from each other.
Use your product whenever you can. Be your company's biggest power user.

What Entrepreneurs Need in the Gen AI Era

Skills That Matter: Idea Generation, Customer Empathy, Clear Communication, and Steadfast Determination

Today's entrepreneurs must look beyond raw technical skills. You need to:

Craft unique ideas to create innovative solutions (for some tips on how to actually generate ideas, I'd recommend this essay from Paul Graham, or this post from my cofounder, Thomas).
Understand customers deeply to build solutions that people will actually adopt.
Clearly communicate the value props of your solution to those customers.
Keep going even when things look bleak.

Inevitably, as the barriers to entry get lower with AI tools, competition will heat up and you must be willing to commit to your idea and outlast the stream of other startups that will challenge you.

Echo is Built for This New Idea-Driven World

I'm betting my career on this shift and building Echo to help others unlock their best ideas faster. Echo isn't just another note-taking app. It's a tool designed explicitly to capture, connect, and develop your best ideas, using generative AI. Echo organizes your thoughts into topics, links seemingly unrelated ideas, and helps you discover and communicate insights you would have otherwise missed.

Here are some real examples for how that's been working for some of our users:

Professor Andy Neely, Cambridge University: "When I was preparing a course, Echo became my go-to tool for quickly jotting down ideas and examples. It let me capture those fleeting thoughts that later evolved into structured teaching content."
Tom Martin, Lawyer and Business Owner: "I was amazed that Echo not only organizes my notes into topics but also interrelates them. A random note on, say, 'watermelon approach' got linked to 'learning strategies' – that unexpected connection really expands my creativity."
Wenhan Zhang, Product Manager at TikTok: "For me, it's all about building my own system of knowledge: gathering ideas from startups, AI, and entrepreneurship, and Echo is the perfect tool to capture and eventually connect those dots."

Welcome to the Era of Ideas

AI has commoditized execution (i.e. technical ability), leaving powerful ideas and deep customer insights as the true differentiators. Work with determination on those insights and build your judgement so that you can effectively create sustainable value with your business.

Reflect on your strategy today: are you prioritizing strong ideas and customer insight? Tools like Echo can sharpen your ideas and give you a lasting competitive edge. And I know I'm taking all the help I can get.