Here&#x27;s my reason why I think &#x27;ideas are cheap&#x27;: About 20 years ago when I was still young and stupid I had a &#x27;great idea&#x27;. In fact, I had several and one of those took off. Because I was young and stupid and I was rather more technical than business oriented my little company and several other companies that were active in the same space were competing in a wide open field without a definition of what success even meant. YCombinator or something like it did not exist back then, nor a HN where you could read up on similar cases to save yourself a bunch of mistakes.<p>So each and every one of those companies made mistakes, and most of them died. My little band of friends and me probably held on the longest but we <i>also</i> made plenty of mistakes but at least ours weren&#x27;t of the fatal variety.<p>Even so, knowing it was a great idea and having all that knowledge and experience gained over those years I <i>still</i> would not know how we could have avoided the cap on our growth and how we could have staved off the inevitable.<p>Eventually lots of people made a ton of money of that same idea, with execution that rivaled or beat ours handily, or with a shift of focus to a different niche (there were 100&#x27;s of those niches and some of those are super profitable).<p>If my team and me would have been better at the execution part, if we had been more business savvy we might have been able to lock up the market.<p>Great ideas I have every day, you can have them, I suspect that your ability to execute on average is about as good as mine or worse so I&#x27;m not too worried about competition in the earliest phase of an idea hitting the market. But once a market has been validated the parties that enter that appreciate the idea <i>and</i> that are good in execution, they&#x27;ll go places.<p>Because you won&#x27;t be able to keep your idea secret <i>and</i> hit the market at the same time, best case you&#x27;ll be able to keep your idea secret until you hit the market, but when you do you had better be ready to lock up that market in a very short time otherwise you will just be another &#x27;also ran&#x27;.<p>My story is one of a reasonably good team, reasonably good execution and a bunch of timing and other mishaps and a general problem of being &#x27;green&#x27;. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the idea.<p>Good ideas have value: to the right team. Even bad ideas properly executed have value to the right team.<p>But good teams and excellent execution are far more rare than good ideas.