Obviously, if you have IP, dont apply at YC because they don't think it's worth anything.
If you have some truly novel technology you DEFINITELY shouldn't go to YC. They're not in the "technology transfer"-y business like universities.
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.
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.
The concept to further research is execution vs ideas: https://www.google.com/search?q=execution+not+ideas
Most markets are for items there are many of. There are lots of apples, people see friends enjoying them, people buy one, like it, buy another, a price is established. Key facts: you get to buy it more than once, more than one person gets to buy it, you can tell in advance it is worth something. Take too many of those away, and the market goes away.
An idea (for a venture) is: unique (a close variant missing a key part has completely different value), you would not pay for it twice, and selling it to multiple people diminishes its value. Why would you think the value of an idea would be well captured in a market?
You do realize a market is just one mechanism for expressing value, right? or is air value-less?
The reason there's no market is because it takes an idea and a person who can execute -- knowledge, skills, connections, experience, etc. Ideas aren't separable from people in a way that would make a market possible.
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.
Can you provide the numbers pls?
"The very best ideas usually don't seem worth stealing."
is an astounding statement.
Sure, the startup "circles" regard an idea as a short description of a sentence or two to a family member, neighbor, or prospective user/customer of how the new product/service will look to them.
But, then what about how to make that product/service work? Ignore that? That part should be crucial: Crucial for having the first good or a much better product/solution, a technological advantage and barrier to entry, etc. That "idea" could take original research, be regarded as valuable intellectual property and protected as a trade secret, etc. Sure, the user/customer need not be aware of that "idea" maybe in the internals of the product/service.
Then to say
"The very best ideas usually don't seem worth stealing."
ignores the crucial, core ideas, say, the details of the coating (likely highly classified and from a lot of R&D) and shape (again from a lot of R&D, and Maxwell's equations computations, likely challenging and classified) that were key to stealth.
Or, here's an "idea": A safe, effective, cheap one pill taken once to cure any cancer. Sure that "idea" is just pie in the sky and worthless. But to create such a pill will take one heck of a good idea. To me it is just such good ideas that should be central in information technology startups. It sounds like Sam is neglecting that any such ideas are possible, relevant, valuable, or important. Or, to me, an idea for an algorithm that shows that P = NP is astounding, and astoundingly valuable -- implement it on a server and behind a lot of security and just sell the results, say, anyone who wants to send in any integer linear programming problem, that is, any of the thousands of important real world examples of NP-complete problems.
My favourite pure good idea with enormous value has to be the Kelly criterion [1].
I'm trying to figure out why I didn't know this.
The Kelly criterion seems to not be well known - why I can't say other than there are a lot of groups that benefit from people being ignorant of it.
None of these are "ideas", they are implementations/executions of ideas. They are the result of trial and error (even thought-experiments) that ultimately resulted in real world impact and observable changes. Ideas are unexpressed potential. How the Navy's version of GPS works isn't valuable until after the Navy starts using it. Before that, it's just conjecture. But at the point where the Navy deploys GPS, while it is information, it's not solely an idea; it's pragmatic.
Even knowledge of a newfangled GPS system the Navy is working on or going to deploy and start using on a certain date isn't an idea anymore: it's actionable information that can be traded on. An idea is a kind of information, but not all information is an idea. And while thoughts can be information, not all thoughts are ideas.
That being said, I think you are partially right: the concept of an idea not having value is unintuitive, and a lot of other industries are commonly in the habit of presenting ideas as having value. You'll see this when people talk about patents, as if having a patent somehow conveys value on the thing that is patented beyond just the government enforced exclusivity. A patented idea that can not be brought to market in some fashion isn't that valuable (and actually has negative value: not only is it not brought to market; without bringing it to market, you can not reap the benefits of exclusivity; and you've paid for obtaining the right to a patent you are unable to exploit. So it's a net negative).
The very best ideas usually don't seem worth stealing.