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Ask HN: How Much Equity For An Idea?

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Re: Ask HN: How Much Equity For An Idea?

#11

Post by kromodor »

Depends on the idea. If the idea is based on real world data, strong feedback and statistics - then, why not.

Otherwise is a complete zero. I personally have ideas for 10 lifetimes of work and that is just the top which I don't scrape after a brief analysis.

As others said - ideas, in their initial states, rarely worth anything. Experience shapes idea into an unrecognisable state and even the right ideas, without the correct offering, may fail.

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Sometimes an idea can be worth a lot. Image a working company in a bottleneck situation on their concept. They have a problem that blocks their scalability. If you bring up an idea, that will fit their situation and be an elegant solution - they this can be worth a lot. But this requires a tremendous experience in the field.

Re: Ask HN: How Much Equity For An Idea?

#12

Post by GFischer »

patmcc wrote: post #10
Mankhool wrote: post #8

As someone who has always heard, "Ideas are worthless without execution" and who was recently told, "Just because you have an App in the iTunes Store doesn't mean that you're not still at the idea stage" I'm going to say his idea isn't worth anything. If I'm going to give 5% of my company to someone, it will be to my very first Dev who built V1.0 for very little money to build out his portfolio and because he liked t…

Serious question to you - if the idea is 0% and the v1.0 is 5%, what's the other 95%?

I'm not the original poster, but I believe the most important part is finding, creating and executing on the business model (value proposition, finding channels, CUSTOMERS), the coding is just a small part of the execution:

http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...

http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/businessmod...

If your iOS app is just relying on the App Store as its channel, and the coding involved more than just writing to spec then maybe it's worth more than 5%, but the main value is in finding the spec, not coding it :) - if part of the value or the main part is having a good execution and user experience, it's also likely worth more than 5%, but it's maybe better for a VC-backed startup to just pay employees.

Re: Ask HN: How Much Equity For An Idea?

#13

Post by 27182818284 »

I'm guessing 0% unless the "idea" is more of a complex engineering theory of some kind.

For example, If the idea is "A better battery." Nothing. If the idea is "A new doping scheme using recent research in unrelated chlorine molecules that can drastically improve lithium ion battery life" then the person deserves equity.

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