Good novel ideas that identify a consumer/user demand are always high value whether implemented or not.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel basically implies this with his "Competition is for suckers, monopoly is where it is at". Yet how many businesses and tech companies get founded doing the same think everyone else is doing (or at least half a dozen competitors)?
Truly novel ideas, truly thinking outside the box, truly seeing possibilities that aren't in existence is HARD. Extremely hard. I can understand why the idea that ideas without implementation is meaningless became so prominent, but that is mainly because most of the ideas people have have been had by 1000 other people so if you arne't implementing they aren't of any use.
Whereas ideas that are truly novel are still extremely valuable because it gives all the hard workers something worthwhile to shoot for (as opposed to yet another social media app).
As an example think of blockchain. Fairly basic from a techincal or implementation sense, it is the idea that was really novel. Even if Bitcoin hadn't been made, the idea itself is enormously valuable. There are 1000s of ideas out there like this waiting for a novel thinker to draw them out of the fog and make them clearly visible.
> There are 1000s of ideas out there like this waiting for a novel thinker to draw them out of the fog and make them clearly visible
I think this is the exact reason people say ideas (on their own) aren't worth very much. "Drawing them out of the fog to make them clearly visible" is the implementation portion as far as I can tell. That's the part that makes the idea valuable.
I, along with thousands of others, had the idea for Doordash/UberEats long before either of them existed. Years before. However, if I had tried to implement the idea back then it still would have likely failed. Even though I had the idea, I had no idea how to implement it (and still probably don't, as it is much more than just a technical problem). I realize that Doordash isn't that novel of an idea. But I think even the incredibly novel ideas are thought of by dozens of people before the "right" person comes along to implement it.
That's why I don't think people are memeing when they say "ideas are worthless", as ggp implied. It's more of a response to the "I have an idea and I'll give you 5% if you build it for me" propositions that developers tend to get.
I don't think people even know what they mean when they talk about startup ideas generally.
If the Bitcoin paper is an implementation, then what is the idea? You could argue that the "idea" would be something like "a distributed trustless transaction protocol" or something.
But then you could as easily argue that that's not an idea. That's a goal.
Inversely, you could argue that the Bitcoin paper is not an implementation, that the implementation is the actual software that... implements the content of the paper.
The problem with "idea" and "implementation" is that they're relative concepts that can be used to separate arbitrary parts of complex systems into two buckets, but where that separation doesn't always provide any insight.
Is general relativity an idea or an implementation (of the idea "a better theory of gravitation than Newtonian mechanics")? Is a winning trading strategy an idea or an implementation (of the idea "something that makes money on the stock market")? Etc.
The whole concept of a "startup idea" itself is fraught with imprecisions. Not to mention the assumption that startups are to be based on one singular idea, which is highly debatable.
