On a tangent, and I’m just spitballing here, how is this for a business idea. I: have a PhD (which is not to say I’m smart, it is just to say I have been exposed to lots of facts that other people may not have been exposed to), and I have a bunch of ideas that may or may not be good ones, but I’m too risk-averse to act on any of them and start a business. You: have a bunch of money and are open to ideas. So you pay me, say, $100 bucks to just vomit my ideas out during a 15 minute phone call. Like a cheap loot box of ideas, most of which have a low probability of success, but there may be a nugget of gold in there.

The thing you learn from start-ups is that ideas are worth nothing. It's execution that matters.

But ... if you were an oracle (religious, not database) who sometimes foretold the future, would there be a marketplace for your ideas? In 2003 if you described a social network would that be valuable information? I tend to think no since there were social networks before Facebook but FB were lucky and executed very well.

There were plenty of social networks before Facebook with MySpace being the biggest.

Chris Sacca: Ideas are cheap; execution is everything.

Now I'm wondering what the expected value is if you were to auction this button pressing opportunity. Intuitively it seems to be over $1m (and less than $25m) so if I'm right then that's better than pressing the red button.

Assuming there's no risk to payouts being made/no fraud/etc. then presumably yes. It's probably related to hedges against commodity price increases/ foreign exchange fluctuation, etc. Not quite the same thing but somewhat similar in principle.

Also made me think of the parallel universe to the show “Silicon Valley” where Richard Hendricks sells Pied Piper to Gavin Belson for like $10 million and happily retires in La Veta, Colorado.

This is how VC works, right?