Paul Graham  in an interesting article shares his notion about people and ideas. The primary point of discussion is why do smart people have dumb ideas?
The reasons for a dumb idea are :

Still life effect:You come up with a random idea, plunge into it, and then at each point (a day, a week, a month) feel you’ve put so much time into it that this must be the idea.How do we fix that? I don’t think we should discard plunging. Plunging into an idea is a good thing. The solution is at the other end: to realize that having invested time in something doesn’t make it

Muck:Making Cool companies need not necessarily result in cool money.Where there’s muck, there’s brass. Meaning that unpleasant work pays.If you’re starting a company that will do something cool, the aim had better be to make money and maybe be cool, not to be cool and maybe make money.

Hyena:Some companies want to be like a hyena, content to survive on carrion because we were afraid of the lions

What’s wrong with the students?They’ve spent 15-20 years solving problems other people have set for them. And how much time deciding what problems would be good to solve?

Finally the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that’s beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don’t– because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing “research,” and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators.