I have heard from several angel investors words to the effect of “I don’t invest in ideas, I invest in people.” Which is to say they prefer a good group of founders with a mediocre idea to a less reliable group of founders with a better one.
This seems similar to your high generic competence standard. The hitch is that the preference for a good team over a good idea doesn’t rest completely on the likelihood with which a mediocre idea will be successfully executed, but rather also on the likelihood that this good team will recognize the mediocrity of the idea and shift to a new one successfully. Quoting from Paul Graham’s essay linked above:
So don’t get too attached to your original plan, because it’s probably wrong. Most successful startups end up doing something different than they originally intended — often so different that it doesn’t even seem like the same company.
I feel like the ability to recognize and then articulate value should be included in the idea of generic competence. Likewise for things like opposition research: following the advertising example, I don’t see why we can’t just recurse on execution advantages with the same basic structure of a story. It is like a Value Sub-Proposition Story, where the specific person is the entrepreneur and the specific problem is delivering on some aspect of the Value Proposition (by getting it in front of people).
It still seems useful to the investor to know whether or not execution advantages are specific and what they may be, and therefore also useful to the entrepreneur to articulate them.
I have heard from several angel investors words to the effect of “I don’t invest in ideas, I invest in people.” Which is to say they prefer a good group of founders with a mediocre idea to a less reliable group of founders with a better one.
This seems similar to your high generic competence standard. The hitch is that the preference for a good team over a good idea doesn’t rest completely on the likelihood with which a mediocre idea will be successfully executed, but rather also on the likelihood that this good team will recognize the mediocrity of the idea and shift to a new one successfully. Quoting from Paul Graham’s essay linked above:
I feel like the ability to recognize and then articulate value should be included in the idea of generic competence. Likewise for things like opposition research: following the advertising example, I don’t see why we can’t just recurse on execution advantages with the same basic structure of a story. It is like a Value Sub-Proposition Story, where the specific person is the entrepreneur and the specific problem is delivering on some aspect of the Value Proposition (by getting it in front of people).
It still seems useful to the investor to know whether or not execution advantages are specific and what they may be, and therefore also useful to the entrepreneur to articulate them.