I ran across this set of lecture notes from Balaji Srinivasan’s “startup engineering” course.

He proposes this format for thinking about the phases a company moves through — from idea to profits:

• An idea is not a mockup
• A mockup is not a prototype
• A prototype is not a program
• A program is not a product
• A product is not a business
• And a business is not profits

You can map this onto the debate between “idea vs. execution” by calling everything below the idea...