I upvoted you but I disagree wholeheartedly with your google invocation: No, Larry and Sergey never expected their startup to become what it is today. Your small-step success feeds into your ambition; it's one they nailed search that they have started to visualize bigger and bigger success, then execute it.
and yet just because they nailed it - still doesn't mean it was a bad idea...
There are plenty of bad ideas that are executed well and don't succeed. There are plenty of good ideas that are executed poorly and succeed anyway.
The point isn't how they executed, it really was a reflection on the david927's assertion that there is a correlation between ease of pitch and how good an idea is, is wrong, plain and simple.
"our site is like facebook meets digg" is an easy pitch (I've actually heard this from someone), and in my humble opinion, is a bad idea
"we want to index all of the world's information" is an easy pitch, and so happens to be a good idea.
