[MrMan]

If ideas were worth so little, wouldn't firms tend to become more monolithic? I feel that ideas are worth more than execution now. It is cheaper and cheaper to execute, but problem solving and creativity, the things that tend to break down atomically into groups of 0-3 founders, are holding their value, or becoming relatively more valuable. I think, personally, that people like to parrot this "ideas are worthless" line but I think that it is conventional wisdom at best and flat wrong at worst. I think "no idea" rounds rely on the fact that investors know that execution risk is getting lower. But finding idea people as atoms is getting harder. If the opposite were true, individual or small clusters of founders would not be so highly valued.

[fusiongyro]

I actually think the conventional wisdom is that ideas are valuable. After all, how often have you told someone an idea and had them tell you to patent it, with the understood implication that you'll somehow be made wealthy just from the idea.

I don't think any of your points really hold water. Even a world in which ideas are worth equally as much as execution would make no sense. I can't fly to work in a picture of a flying car; the execution for new vehicles hasn't gotten any cheaper or there would be more novelty car companies. I can't network with my friends using Diaspora. If execution were so easy, there should be ten decentralized Facebook clones with proper privacy guarantees by now, and there aren't. Spend four hours walking around, wherever you are, and you can find a dozen or more people convinced they have brilliant web ideas they just don't know how to execute. Everyone who can't program is an "idea man." Separating terrible ideas from the rest isn't hard, but without time travel it's impossible to distinguish decent ideas from extraordinary ones.

The Valley is becoming more and more insular and self-referencing. From outside, where I am, it looks to me like a mirror of the setup for the housing bubble, where the value of everything today is zero and the value of everything tomorrow is infinite, so nobody is doing anything today except trading the possibility of doing more and better things tomorrow. An idea or a founder might be worth a lot in this environment right now, but I don't think this situation is sustainable.

[MrMan]

I can't address sweeping dismissals but I can offer another narrative. A few years ago Hacker News started to become popular. PG blogged about things and wrote books and raised his profile and the profile of this site, and the profile of the companies in which he invested. Around this time it became clear that it was getting easier to start web companies. Cheaper in raw dollars to setup, you could hire fewer people who could support more users. This is true. It was mildly insightful in 2008 to say this, but now people put their scalability recipes on slideshare and it's clear that a small team can "execute" their ideas more easily now. And this is just in the world of "tech" which I think is mis-labelled.

It has nothing to do with geography, despite the efforts of propaganda emanating from the Valley to convince you otherwise.

By all means don't take my word for it, but by the same token don't fly off the handle talking about flying cars. Just think quietly about how impossible many businesses that currently exist would be a decade ago. I never said anything about the Valley in my previous post. I don't have anything to do with the Valley, but your remoteness from it doesn't help your post gain any clarity.

[remarkable]

Maybe YC should pivot and give founders 7% as a royalty for their idea?

[MrMan]

Maybe YC is just trying to catch elusive human resources in its net and deploy them to projects that have been vetted by its network of advisors and affiliates?

Payments are made in the form of equity or convertible debt - no need for nasty perpetual licenses in the form of royalty payments. If many startup web businesses are not taking in much cash, but are rather meant to be sold on to larger business as interlocking pieces in the advertising money deployment machine, why commit to a stream of cash payments in the future?

No-idea recruiting is a way to shake out people who may be valuable to plug into startups but for some reason are not coming up with the right ideas themselves. Or at least that is my opinion.