If an idea is a good business opportunity, it's common for multiple people to be working on it independently at the same time. It's also common for many people to fail working on that very idea before you get to it.

One of the values of VCs and networks and experts is that they can tell you how other companies in your space have failed (running out of money, founder breakups, "people won't pay for it", "it really needs X but X doesn't scale", etc.).

If you watch the start-up space for long enough you start seeing multiple teams with the "same idea" but only a handful succeed at it; even at small a scale as university incubators.

There are a number of ways to think about this, but one of them comes from "design thinking", which advocates processes like brainstorming in order to generate and sort ideas before starting a project. This is in contrast to what I sometimes think of as the "natural" or "naive" approach to starting a project, where you might spend time searching for "an idea", and when you've found "the idea", you begin executing. Turns out, methods of ideating reveal that a single person or a group of people can easily come up with thousands of good ideas in a matter of hours. After participating in these sorts of activities, I find it impossible to assign much value to an idea. The actual value, or lack thereof, only reveals itself much later and involves many more factors than the initial concept.

Here's another one: what is an idea? Typically it is a sentence expressing a business proposition, or the essential functioning of a technology. But is it the same "idea" no matter who utters it? I think it's pretty clear that an idea is actually short-hand for a 'space of experience' held by the person saying it. In this sense, it's actually not possible to "steal" an idea, because ideas are linked to the people who have them, and because were someone to try, they would find that they can steal the sentence that refers to the actual idea, but lack the perspective to unlock the true meaning.

Either way, this is a meme in the startup industry, and very true in my experience. Do not fixate on ideas: nobody can steal them and/or they are not important in the first place.

This might help: https://crew.co/how-to-build-an-online-business/idea-vs-exec...

The concept to further research is execution vs ideas: https://www.google.com/search?q=execution+not+ideas

If ideas worth something, then an idea would be a commodity being traded among people in markets. Since there isn't a market where people trade ideas with something else, like money, there simply isn't a market for ideas. Hence, ideas are worth nothing.

There's a recent rant about it here https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/4akqt9/you_are_pr...

Obviously it depends a bit on the details but if you think of the big hits, saying say Alta Vista is crap let's build a better search engine or Myspace is crap let's build a better one of those wasn't worth much for the basic ideas because hundreds of people no doubt thought that. Now the detailed algorithms may have been worth something. But it's mostly in the actually building the better thing that counts.

I guess knowing which ideas are good would be valuable. If someone had said you'd make a fortune doing myspace with real names and no flashing nonsense that would have been useful but just having a list of a 1000 ideas with no testing is probably not worth much.

Ideas are cheap, it's the execution and the team that matter.

Execution > Ideas. Most startups end up being famous for something else than the original idea. Read Founders at Work to get a glimpse of this.