I just need a programmer

A computationally-literate idea that's well developed, on the other hand, can be very valuable, and can account for probably 90% of the interestingness of idea+implementation. Not always: sometimes you find really major things in the implementation that cause you to rethink the idea. But there are many times that I've implemented a theoretical idea myself and not really learned anything in doing so. You read a paper, or even a blog post, which explains an idea in detail, motivates why the author developed it, gives a broad sketch of how you'd implement it, etc., etc., but the author hasn't actually implemented it. Then I implement it myself. Have I provided the majority of the value, because I'm the first person with working code? Not really; in many cases the implementation was a pretty straightforward translation of the idea into code.

A computationally literate and well-developed idea is arguably something close to "execution", but not quite the nuts-and-bolts variety. To use a physics analogy, my ideas on space travel are not very well developed or valuable, but Freeman Dyson's are valuable, even though he's implemented his ideas to the same extent I have: neither one of us has ever attempted to build spaceships. He's a pure idea-person, but his ideas are developed quite fully, so readers can understand what he proposed and why, what its pros and cons might be, what possible pitfalls await, what the broad outlines of possible fixes for those pitfalls might be (even if they depend on materials or other things not currently available), etc.

I'd say the same of people even further into idea-land, like Isaac Asimov, who provided valuable ideas with nothing close to an implementation. The trick imo is that most ideas either just aren't novel enough to be interesting, or aren't sufficiently well developed and explained to provide value to a reader.

Are you a solid-brass-balls entrepreneur not afraid of rasing money? Can you knock down every tabloid's door to get our story told? Can you set up appointments across the globe with people richer than god? Can you bring a thousand customers just the first month and two thousands more the next?

I can code the whole fucking app in one month and get version two ready the next month if that is what you need. See? That's execution, my friend. I can code apps blindfolded and with my hands tied. Can you do business like that? I don't want dreamers, I want doers.

Now, stop wasting my time with an idea, I have had plenty every day of my life since I started programming and I have spent twenty years perfectioning my skills. I know what I can do.

So, I ask you again, what are your business skills? Besides having an idea?

Perhaps it is just different fields, but most academics I know (I know math from my own graduate studies and history indirectly through my wife) will talk your ear off about their current work if you express a willingness to listen much less an interest. Most of the ones I know (again math and history) aren't worried about idea stealing because they have more ideas than they have time to work on and they know that all but the most trivial ideas will take substantial work to go forward with, its the research that counts not the idea for research.

IANAL and everything, but some IP lawyers came to talk to a startup I worked at once to tell us about how important it is to shut the fuck up, and evidently simply being "the programmer" doesn't mean you have to be included on a patent.

IANAL, but this definitely fits with my limited understanding of patent law. But that does not mean ideas per se have value outside the law. This is more an indication that patent law needs to be reformed than that ideas have intrinsic value.

(Incidentally, Richard Feynman has an interesting story about how his name wound up on the patent for nuclear submarines in his book: What Do You Care What Other People Think?)