Is there an implied non disclose agreement/non compete agreement on the part of the evaluators when they evaluate the vast number of intellectual property submitted to them?
They wont sign an NDA (apparently this is common among investors), but they wont steal your idea either. Even if they did, ideas are only as good as how they are executed. By themselves ideas are worth very little (look at Facebook vs. ConnectU), especially in the early stages since they change a lot.
The idea is a very necessary factor, but yes not by itself sufficient. The Paul Graham article "How to Start a Startup" assumes that a startup is only developing something to improve on an existing idea/technology.
A startup inventing a product would be taking a huge leap of faith by believing that a power broker like Y Combinator would not be tempted to (in the event they came across an idea that they felt was revolutionary) to not farm out the engineering/business dev to seasoned developers; especially if they lacked faith in the approach/abilities of the founders. After all the process of execution/development is pretty much a commodity task.
No it doesn't.
"In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.
Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year." (How to Start a Startup)
Sure, search engines sucked (algorithm-wise) before Google but the concept/idea of a technology to aggregate links by relevance, was pretty critical to Google's existence, IMHO.
Certainly Pagerank was important, but I would assume(so I could be wrong) there were Pagerank copycats in the early days. Having Pagerank was a necessity for Google or any copycat to become the best search engine. But it's the dozens of other things that they did at Google that were just as necessary to make a search site that didn't suck IMHO. Clean, fast, simple, etc. I think Pagerank was great but if you were to drop that behind the UI of a competing search engine it wouldn't have had nearly as much impact as it did at Google.
But my assumptions could be wrong. Maybe Google's IP prevented anyone from doing a PR copycat and that led to its success.
If you have some process/idea that is really as significant as you say, and the barriers of entry to implement it are so low that anyone who simply hears about it could screw you, then you should apply for a patent.
Thanks for the to-the-point response.
why you ask? it's simple... no respectable VC company wants to be known as the company that stole "your name here"'s idea. imagin what would happen if word get out that they stole someones idea after hearing their pitch. nobody would ever pitch to them again.
when all else fails.. use the "poor mans patent" print off your code, idea, etc. and register mail it to yourself, but don't open it. in case you ever need proof you have it... signed, dated, and stamped.