In defense of idea people/patents
And against the startup culture that shits on idea people and says "ideas don't matter"
“Ideas don’t matter, only execution does”. “Tell everyone your idea.” “Ideas are worthless”. These are the counterintuitive things we learn to adopt that make us feel more sophisticated when our non-founder friends are guarded about their startup ideas. But I think we’re honestly in the middle of the dunning-kruger graph here, and the truth is, it really depends on the idea, and sometimes it is the literal worst thing you can do to tell someone your idea. In short, this advice applies to generic ideas. But more importantly, it’s unproductive to have a culture that doesn’t reward or encourage innovative ideas.
Right now, unfortunately, you get more reward for simply being connected and hearing a great idea and then hiring people to build it. This in turn sets the goal clear: to get rich off of great ideas, it’s better to just execute on 1 faster. That is a function of resources and (often) engineering speed. So we say “execution matters, not ideas” and shit on idea people. This is horrible and is the reason we have generic ideas everywhere. Also, that marginal speed factor shouldn’t really matter if our goal is long-term prosperity.
The way to solve is patents that are defensible and cheaper. And to develop a culture that likes ideas.
It is certainly unjust, but moral arguments are always super gray. I’m not going to get into ethics. I’m also not going to get in to what is the optimal path for winning as a startup founder, I’m just going to argue that it is net-net not maximizing productivity for society overall to massively weight execution over ideas, and to treat ideas as being worthless.
Brief note: “Ideas” doesn’t mean “teleportation”. Ideas means having the product execution down too—i.e. a functional *idea* of how to build teleportation. A good heuristic for my definition of “idea” is if you can patent it, which requires functionally explaining how the system would work. It usually refers to hardware/physical products > software, but not always.
We should recognize that some ideas are worth telling your friends about, i.e. most *business* (not product) innovations. But true product innovations, should be guarded, and the benefit of new product innovations to society is wayyyy more of an improvement than a billion people outcompeting on minor tweaks of those same products. There are different kinds of ideas and some are more rare and require deeper expertise. We’re not talking about startup marketplaces or newsletters; we’re talking Tesla coils and the car. It’s just not good for getting most productiveness in differentiated ways and ensuring people work on different stuff. Having lots of versions of the same thing is less productive than a few versions of very different things—which is what a patentable world looks like.
Patents are the only protection the little guy has, other than moving lightning quick and praying to god! It’s a complete psyop to make you feel guilty for thinking you have good innovative ideas. Most don’t! but you do (maybe).
Further proof that people in tech’s revulsion to the notion that “ideas might matter more than execution and people should get ownership for being first to have an idea” is a literal psyop—is shown in how nontech areas of the world view the importance of ideas and being first. People freak out when you copy their tweets. We have amazing copyright laws—like it’s harder to steal the name “mickey mouse” than it is to steal the idea behind a robotic mouse powered in a unique way. Music notes, comedians’ jokes, etc. the list goes on where people generally accept the importance of ideas, and for good reason. Imagine we took the tech attitude towards execution being way more important than ideas for like Harry Potter—should JK Rowling lose out to people who can figure out how to make the same story just go viral and hit more book stores faster?
The big companies patent incessantly, and yet we’re supposed to think patents are a weak man’s game? With all their reach and resources and economies of scale, why do big companies still patent? They need it the least! Yet still deploy it. It’s criminal. It’s making us worse. We need the vibe of move fast break things, but with respecting the person who is slower but still paved the way for the nerdy engineer to build the thing quicker than the genius physicist.
This lack of respect and defensibility of novel ideas is also what leads people to work on the same shit and just out-distribute. This in consequence forces the founders of these companies to hyper-optimize for distribution and engagement, leading to features that make you addicted (to facebook for example). if it were only MACRO-level competitors that did things radically different (like snapchat vs facebook, NOT myspace vs facebook for example), then these companies could work on bigger changes and not obsess over every eyeball since the risk of losing customers is just marginal, since players are competing on bigger things and smaller things don’t make a difference. But it’s life or death on the line here if someone can just copy you and out-addictify their audience.
There’s more money in being a marketing guru and learning how to nail cold emails than a genius inventor who understands photonics more than anyone else because the world doesn’t value your ideas and certainly doesn’t protect them (too expensive to patent, litigate if someone violates a patent).
There’s no incentive to become an inventor. Charles Goodyear, Nikola Tesla, Philo Farnsworth (the inventor of the TV), all should have gotten rich but died penniless. and my guess is if they did, we would have cured cancer by now, have flying cars etc. Smart creatives would opt for a life of inventing new things instead of becoming software engineers at SAAS startups or bankers….or worse: convincing themselves they are being innovative by starting insignificant SAAS startups.
We depend on innovations in science, math, manufacturing engineering, etc yet the people that reap rewards are usually just the ultra connected or often the great marketers. Historically, this happened with Farnsworth and RCA. It happened with Tesla and JP Morgan/Edison. It happens fucking today! Let's not debate ethics, though. I simply want to maximize utility, encouraging the most impactful work. Encouraging more ideas, more truly novel useful ideas, more invention, will lead to net increase utility for the whole world’s benefit.
You’re kind of missing the big picture when you say “ideas don’t matter”. We have only been able to take hot showers for the past 150 years. Look around your room-the main driver of these things are novel, well-informed, ideas that worked—not that some guy growth-hacked a product. Protect the idea people. We’re in a renaissance of ideas—and when all is said and done, in history books, people will remember those with the powerful ideas.
Take a step back. The entire point of this tech industry is literally just invention. We call this “deep tech” now, but that’s the thing we hmans have done like forever! Invent new. It’s the one persistent thing that moves us forward. We forget that amid the deluge of SAAS companies, and consumer apps. But the invention that made these things? the Internet. Do you even know the guy who invented it? Who thought of how to do it?
Let’s not have the next Nikola Tesla die penniless…Honestly, the present is even darker than that. The Teslas of our day just pivot into 15 minute grocery delivery for a niche market — they don’t get robbed, they don’t even try because the reward just isn’t there.
Common responses:
1. “Every idea has been thought of”: wrong. Maybe you have thought of nothing original. Some people do think of brand new things that have never been thought of. Not the idea itself—but the version of the idea. For instance, using alternating current to make electricity. Or vacuum tubes for light bulbs. THAT’S an idea.
2. “Nikola Tesla just wasn’t business savvy— most value comes from business, so he deserved nothing”: bullshit. You will never get anyone that actually is rare and important who can cure cancer etc incentivized to do anything if you don’t just let them cook on the invention/product side. Business people are replicable. These inventors are not. You can’t expect everyone to master both (like Elon or Edison)—some are just as good oas Elon/Edison on the invention side. And that’s the more useful and more rare thing anyway.
3. “Everyone’s got an idea though. People approach me as an engineer/designer all the time to build their thing”: some ideas matter, some don’t. Not a one size fits all framework. The true innovations on product/engineering are ideas that do matter. And yes, they are ideas, not execution of ideas. They are things that occur in one’s brain, without doing anything. They don’t require doing. Therefore, they are ideas. But yes, they are more than simply “uhhhh dating app for pet owners”.
4. “Inventors don’t care about being rich”: wrong again. Yes, smarter people have more that they care about than just money, like fulfilling their potential and getting their ideas out in the world, or pursuing truth etc., but no, they do care about money, and again, you’re just defending the status quo blindly.
5. “That’s just capitalism”: I love capitalism —but only where it’s meritocratic. Otherwise, it’s simply going to result in less productivity. So, free markets are great, but just having people use their capital to compound their power and outcompete those who thought of the thing? No. That’s not meritocracy. And if you were thinking from first principles about WHY you like capitalism, you would agree.
6. “Impossible to execute ideas if everything is claimed”: Fair. My solution: simply force the right to license. And require that like 10% of the revenue goes to inventor. That’s all that inventors want. Trust me. Just a taste is enough. Imagine if Philo, Nikola, etc. got 10% of RCA, Edison. Do you even know who invented the Internet??
Solutions:
Use AI to drive down cost of patenting/defending patents: this could be a boon for smart innovators or the worst thing ever as big companies just build and copy and it’s about capital. Intellect only matters now.
Change the law: Let AI in the courtroom and make the time to litigate reduced to mere months, not years. Because even if you can litigate for cheap, it’ll take too long for you to get distracted and fold if you’re poor/just starting out.
Create resources for young creatives to invent: create a university/YC for inventors.
Change the culture: Stop saying “ideas don’t matter”. Start encouraging people to think and go deep on random subjects, for they might just have that next world-changing idea…..also bring back World’s fairs.
Require inventors allow people to license their invention and enforce some % of revenue going to inventor. I can elaborate more on this so that it rewards every dependent patent that a new patent might have in a tree like structure, but it’s not important—there probably is an optimal way to reward everyone and incentivize new inventions. We’re not there. Let’s get there. Step 1: change the dialogue