Often a business is about the team, not the concept. Given any talented team, they an take any concept and evolve it to fit the market.
Also, there's no way he was able to take any of those concepts far enough given the numbers and time frame.
It can often take a small team several months to a couple of years to find out if it's going to really work or not.
I’ve come to view great teams as “necessary but not sufficient”. That is: without a great team you will fail, but even with one you still need to build something a market will pay for.
If an objectively great team was all you needed, venture investors wouldn’t be satisfied with the dismal likelihood of getting returns on startup money (compared to other forms of investing).
Re: giving concepts time—fair point, but I think you also have to consider your own time as an investment. Sure a failing project could work with 2y more effort, but is it worth two years of your life to find out if it hasn’t already worked? What if you spent that time on giving another idea a chance?
Bach wrote almost a piece every day. For most of his life. Most of it will never be played or heard.
The thing that's most common among the 'greats' is how prolific they were. They just kept doing. Just watching Jim Henson. Bio - he was doing Kermite for like 20 years before it remotely caught on. I worked at BlackBerry - the company started in 1982, about 20 years before the BB wars born. The other CEO started in 1992 about 10 years. So 30 man-years of combined CEO work before the BB came to be a product.
Predicting which software businesses will find this fit is extremely hard. VCs know this, and diversify their investments among many founders (knowing one big payday can make up for 10-100 failures).
Looks like this founder diversified by himself and launched small things faster. And eventually found something worth "marrying".