> You can literally try to clone any YC company after demo day.

Not quite true. A growing number are hardware/robotics or biotech or some other field that require significant capital investment and highly specialist Phd-level expertise to even get a proof-of-concept off the ground, so you can't just "open your favorite editor" and get started.

Then you have those which cover a niche that again requires some kind of insider knowledge or connections (it helped for example that Facebook was created in Harvard). That's not to say these are impossible barriers, but again they're not broken by hacking away at node or PHP.

The pool of ideas that a) you, personally, can execute on today and b) have a hope of generating profit or funding within a reasonable timeframe is not as big as people like to think. Much of the low-hanging fruit of profitable ideas that can be executed by the single coder in the proverbial basement has been picked long ago.

Every time a new platform or a new device gets launched there are low-hanging opportunities aplenty. It is easy to overestimate how big the opportunity has to be in order to be worthwhile for a single programmer. Those opportunities don't get pursued by established businesses because they are too small, leaving the field ripe for the picking.

That's very true, I think there's a window of opportunity when a new device/technology becomes mainstream before it becomes commoditized/cornered by a few big players : thinking of the web, then mobile, now the app stores are saturated and very few people can make money from them. VR might be the next wave (although plenty of false starts in that space).

>>what's stopping you

As I say, there's not many ideas that seem inspiring, and as you rightly point out, I'm committed to my own foolish ideas.

How can you be committed to your own ideas and at the same time announce you're willing to abandon them the moment you see a different idea that "blows you away"? And if you're not that committed to your own ideas, the odds aren't good that you'll stick with them long term.

As I said, if I was totally blown away by something then I'd act on it. It would of course have to justify dropping my other projects but I am willing to do that if the idea is good enough.

This practice happens all the time with books that are successful. Other books leech on to the traffic by using the same keywords, but what you'll notice is that the quality of the books is very poor because the author's heart and soul are not invested in the project. Startups that do well, like books, seem to all enjoy the participation of leadership and creativity aligned around a passionate interest in the problem, creative or logical or both.