But how to create stealth took some darned good "ideas".
Sure, the startup "circles" regard an idea as a short description of a sentence or
two to a family member, neighbor, or prospective user/customer of how the new product/service will look to them.
But, then what about how to make that product/service work? Ignore that? That part should be crucial: Crucial
for having the first good or a much better product/solution,
a technological advantage and barrier to entry,
etc. That "idea" could take
original research, be regarded as
valuable intellectual property and protected as a trade secret,
etc.
Sure, the user/customer need
not be aware of that "idea" maybe in the internals of the product/service.
Then to say
"The very best ideas usually don't seem worth stealing."
ignores the crucial, core ideas, say, the details of the coating (likely highly classified and from a lot of R&D) and shape (again
from a lot of R&D, and
Maxwell's equations computations, likely
challenging and classified) that were key to stealth.
Or, here's an "idea": A safe, effective, cheap one pill taken once to cure any cancer. Sure that "idea" is just pie in the sky and worthless. But to create such a pill will take one heck of a good idea. To me it is just such good ideas that
should be central in information technology
startups. It sounds like
Sam is neglecting that
any such ideas are possible,
relevant, valuable, or important. Or, to me, an
idea for an algorithm that
shows that P = NP is astounding, and astoundingly valuable -- implement it on
a server and behind a lot of
security and just sell the
results, say, anyone who
wants to send in any
integer linear programming
problem, that is, any of
the thousands of important
real world examples of
NP-complete problems.