I see this notion that ideas are worthless, or that everyone has the same ideas, a lot and I could not disagree with it more. I think this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of novel ideas.
For one, novel ideas are often difficult to communicate effectively, and difficult to grasp. Ideas that are notably different and blatantly obviously advantageous are typically few and far between, because such ideas would have already been implemented, being obvious, after all. Most good novel ideas have some degree of subtlety involved in them, or require a paradigm shift to truly understand well. Trying to digest such ideas without having that shifted mental model will often lead to misunderstanding. Additionally, communicating complex ideas can be very difficult. Consider how often book adaptations into movies fail to carry over even the core ideas or zeitgeist of the original material, and in that case you have a richly detailed (multi thousand word) source material as well as the resources of thousands upon thousands of folks who have read it to aid in that translation. In comparison, the idea that a complex idea can be easily and trivially transmitted from one mind to the next without error through a short pitch is ludicrous. And even less likely the more novel and interesting the source idea happens to be.
For another, novel ideas are often quite subtle, and don't look as revolutionary until the revolution has passed. Consider, for example, the transistor, or heavier than air flight. Neither of which received a great deal of press at the time, both of which were, undoubtedly, some of the most transformative inventions in history, based on numerous new ideas. The transistor seems, on the surface, to be little more than a different kind of thing in the same vein as the vacuum tube, and thus to be met with a similar level of success as the vacuum tube. But, of course, it is a different beast entirely. Solid state, miniaturizable, more suitable for mass production, more reliable, etc. It would lead to a revolution immediately in transistorization of electronics such as radio sets, making them smaller, cheaper, and more reliable. But, of course, it would also lead to the advent of the integrated circuit, digital logic, micro-processors and the personal computer revolution.
Yet to someone like this silicon valley marketer if they saw a pitch for the transistor they would almost certainly think it was nothing special, and not a new idea.
There are countless similar examples across the tech industry, and across history. The web, for example, was not all that different, per se, from gopher or FTP or other forms of information exchange from the early years of the public internet. But, of course, it was the specifics of the web that truly made it not just slightly different from other "ideas" for sharing information but transformatively, revolutionarily different.
If you look at cells under a microscope they mostly all look the same. Yeast cells, bacteria, even animal cells, they all just look like little mostly circular blobs. But just looking at a cell tells you almost nothing about it, you can't see the DNA, you can't see the cellular machinery. You can't see the difference between a cell that belongs to a sea sponge and one that belongs to a human being. Ideas are similar. When you view ideas by buzzing over them at the 10,000 ft altitude level of a pitch deck that you stare at for a few minutes they're going to blend together a lot.
For one, novel ideas are often difficult to communicate effectively, and difficult to grasp. Ideas that are notably different and blatantly obviously advantageous are typically few and far between, because such ideas would have already been implemented, being obvious, after all. Most good novel ideas have some degree of subtlety involved in them, or require a paradigm shift to truly understand well. Trying to digest such ideas without having that shifted mental model will often lead to misunderstanding. Additionally, communicating complex ideas can be very difficult.
Yes. High level ideas that people pitch are in themselves are not novel. The idea to come up with a cure to cancer is not novel. The idea to come up with a kickass search engine is also not novel.
It is execution that matters. The details matter. The subtle insights matter. And, I believe that is what you are trying to say here. Google may not have been the first search engine but their technology was faster and the user experience was better than their counterparts. This execution is what I'm saying should be highlighted in pitches as a way to differentiate one's business -- not the high level ideas.
A cure for cancer that actually works is novel. Execution is not all that matters, you need to have both a good idea and execute on it. There are many more good teams that can execute than there are really great ideas.
Novelty is overrated. A novel product; a novel sales channel; a novel subset of customer all contribute to failure. Its not only hard to educate investors about your startup; its hard to educate customers! There is tremendous value in the familiar.
I'd say (and heard others say) every point of IP in a new product is a red flag.
That's the thing, novelty doesn't have to even be perceptible to the end-user.
Consider Google for example. When they came on the scene they introduced roughly 3 different novel things to the familiar search landscape: pagerank (crazy CS PhD level search result optimization crap), map-reduce running on sharded multi-host web-accessed supercomputers, and revolutionary heavily automated data center management.
These things were as different as what had come before to the same degree as if you opened a door in a library and stepped into an alien mothership. But they very much contributed to google's success. They meant that google produced better search results (pagerank) faster (map-reduce + sharding) and cheaper (IT ops) than competitors. And that would lead to their huge advantages in monetizing their search results (better, faster, cheaper means higher profit margin on lower cpms).
But for the end user, they did not have to grapple with any of that novelty. Google users didn't have to understand pagerank or map-reduce. They simply went to google.com and saw a familiar though even simpler search page than they were familiar with from google's many competitors and predecessors, they typed in their search query and pressed the search button. And then they were presented with a list of results, just as all other search engines before. The difference for them was that the results were better, the pages were easier to navigate due to a cleaner design, and the results were produced faster.
This sort of thing is common in technology. The process for riding an airplane is not terribly different from that of riding a bus, you walk through a door, you sit in a seat for some time, and then you get off at your destination. The process of building and flying planes is vastly different, of course, but air travel customers don't typically need to know how to fly or build planes.
For one, novel ideas are often difficult to communicate effectively, and difficult to grasp. Ideas that are notably different and blatantly obviously advantageous are typically few and far between, because such ideas would have already been implemented, being obvious, after all. Most good novel ideas have some degree of subtlety involved in them, or require a paradigm shift to truly understand well. Trying to digest such ideas without having that shifted mental model will often lead to misunderstanding. Additionally, communicating complex ideas can be very difficult. Consider how often book adaptations into movies fail to carry over even the core ideas or zeitgeist of the original material, and in that case you have a richly detailed (multi thousand word) source material as well as the resources of thousands upon thousands of folks who have read it to aid in that translation. In comparison, the idea that a complex idea can be easily and trivially transmitted from one mind to the next without error through a short pitch is ludicrous. And even less likely the more novel and interesting the source idea happens to be.
For another, novel ideas are often quite subtle, and don't look as revolutionary until the revolution has passed. Consider, for example, the transistor, or heavier than air flight. Neither of which received a great deal of press at the time, both of which were, undoubtedly, some of the most transformative inventions in history, based on numerous new ideas. The transistor seems, on the surface, to be little more than a different kind of thing in the same vein as the vacuum tube, and thus to be met with a similar level of success as the vacuum tube. But, of course, it is a different beast entirely. Solid state, miniaturizable, more suitable for mass production, more reliable, etc. It would lead to a revolution immediately in transistorization of electronics such as radio sets, making them smaller, cheaper, and more reliable. But, of course, it would also lead to the advent of the integrated circuit, digital logic, micro-processors and the personal computer revolution.
Yet to someone like this silicon valley marketer if they saw a pitch for the transistor they would almost certainly think it was nothing special, and not a new idea.
There are countless similar examples across the tech industry, and across history. The web, for example, was not all that different, per se, from gopher or FTP or other forms of information exchange from the early years of the public internet. But, of course, it was the specifics of the web that truly made it not just slightly different from other "ideas" for sharing information but transformatively, revolutionarily different.
If you look at cells under a microscope they mostly all look the same. Yeast cells, bacteria, even animal cells, they all just look like little mostly circular blobs. But just looking at a cell tells you almost nothing about it, you can't see the DNA, you can't see the cellular machinery. You can't see the difference between a cell that belongs to a sea sponge and one that belongs to a human being. Ideas are similar. When you view ideas by buzzing over them at the 10,000 ft altitude level of a pitch deck that you stare at for a few minutes they're going to blend together a lot.