The greatest compliment you can receive about your alpha source isn’t “You’re a genius.” It’s “That shouldn’t be possible. I’m disillusioned to live in a world is so inefficient.”
Of course, you should never hear either response because you should never flaunt these discoveries in the first place.
This is good. The illusion is probably resilient enough that you could even point your discovery out and most people wouldn’t acknowledge it unless forced to.
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
―Howard Aiken, A Computer Science Reader : Selections from Abacus by Eric A. Weiss, (p. 404), 1988.
Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here’s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.
This is good. The illusion is probably resilient enough that you could even point your discovery out and most people wouldn’t acknowledge it unless forced to.