Proving once again, an idea without execution is worth precisely fuck all. All the non-technical founders out there trying to rip the executors in terms of equity, take note.

Exactly, "inventing" is the wrong word, if you invent you build, an idea by itself is useless without execution.

"Useless" is also the wrong word.

Execution is more than building a site. Groupon, especially, is an example of a site that is successful due to the deals that they can negotiate and their quality writing.

That's not to say that I disagree with you that the builders deserve good equity as well.

Greoup buying has been done many times before, including in the bubble. GroupOn has the distinction of working. I also think it is essentially orthogonal to the original group buying aspect but that was useful pretraction.

If Arrington had invented Groupon, he would have invented Groupon

I wouldn't say invented so much as 'foresaw the large opportunity'.

It popped up on Techcrunch a lot before GroupOn, ie. how is it that the $170B local ad market has been left untouched by the web?

A business idea is conjecture, execution is an experiment.

The word 'invented' here is a vocabulary failure.

Ideas are cheap, good execution is worth millions (or in Groupon's case billions).

<snark> and I invented time machine in 2001 </snark>

Idea means almost nothing. Execution is the hard part.

he's also listed spotify/grooveshark there in number 6 ...

anyway, I would hardly call having an idea an invention ... the invention is the implementation of that idea, which is worth nothing until it's actually implemented ...

Apparently he also came up with dropbox

More like Carbonite, Backblaze, Mozy, Crashplan, etc.

Is Dropbox today's answer to idea #1?

"500 GB for $20 per year" I wish!

and ordered bullet list