Hi, I'm Andre Lewis and I'm on the Internet

I read some of  Paul Graham's essays a while ago, and I just came across them again. A pleasure to read, especially as I've been mulling over a lot of entrepreneurial ideas lately. Some excerpts:

From "How to Start a Startup:"

If you want ideas for startups, one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers. Most good hackers have no more idea of the horrors perpetrated in these places than rich Americans do of what goes on in Brazilian slums.

On the value of startup ideas in and of themselves (http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html)

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

On "staying upwind" (also from the 'ideas' essay):

I don't think people consciously realize this, but one reason downwind jobs like churning out Java for a bank pay so well is precisely that they are downwind. The market price for that kind of work is higher because it gives you fewer options for the future. A job that lets you work on exciting new stuff will tend to pay less, because part of the compensation is in the form of the new skills you'll learn.

Finally . . .I think there's a real glut of me-too Web 2.0 startups. This last excerpt struck a chord regarding why some of the offerings seem so inane (once more, from 'ideas'):

In theory you could stick together ideas at random and see what you came up with. What if you built a peer-to-peer dating site? Would it be useful to have an automatic book? Could you turn theorems into a commodity? When you assemble ideas at random like this, they may not be just stupid, but semantically ill-formed. What would it even mean to make theorems a commodity? You got me. I didn't think of that idea, just its name.

The key takeaway, I think, is that the team is far more important than the idea. True for investers like Graham, and certainly true in my own experience.