> I have no idea what the point of this post was.

Well, as in my post elsewhere in this thread, the
title of this thread is just flatly, literally wrong,
as in not true, as in false. But, I will try to
explain, maybe, "the point" of the original post:

In venture capital, the
claim in the title is commonly made: So, maybe,
"the point" is just to discuss the claim and
related thoughts.

But, he continues and makes another mistake:
He has,

> The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before."

I see two things wrong here:

(1) With the qualification "nearly always",
along with his comment about "lazy", we have
to conclude that he's been talking to the
wrong entrepreneurs.

(2) His "this" as an "idea" is wrong:
As we have covered on HN before, it appears that
in Silicon Valley what is meant by an "idea"
is just some vague, short, maybe one sentence
statement of what the product/service would look
like to a customer on a first glance. So, with
this meaning of an idea there is nothing to
patent, protect with a trade secret, use as
Ph.D. dissertation, publish in a peer-reviewed
journal of original research in, say, a STEM
field, etc. Or, an idea is like "I want to
fly to the moon" where we can ask who the
heck first thought of that and then conclude
who the heck cares.

So, for people doing advanced work in STEM
fields and looking for business success with,
also, say, a technological barrier to entry,
his concept of an idea is nearly trivial.
He's got an entrepreneur and wants to
talk trivialities? Gads.

His mistake is to be looking for something
nearly trivial. Instead for ideas
he should be looking
for something, to borrow, "new, correct, and
significant", and, of course, for
start-ups how to make money.

So, in his work with ideas, he's looking
for the wrong stuff. In case I rub
some fur the wrong way, I highly value
and respect my view of ideas -- e.g., my
Ph.D. dissertation was mostly just ideas,
and they weren't just one or a few sentences
and trivial.

More broadly I have another concern for
information technology start-ups, venture
capital, and our economy more generally:
In short, the concern is that we are shooting
ourselves in the gut. Or, earlier this week
I happened to look at the Web site of Polaris
Partners, and there I saw the backgrounds of
the partners: Several, maybe all, the partners
interested in biotechnology had biotechnology
Ph.D. degrees. No partner interested in
information had a Ph.D. degree. And that
Web site is not the only such.

In my career, nearly always I had my
technical work, and since I quite mowing
grass for a few dollars as a teenager
all of my work has been technical, reviewed
by someone who had the qualifications to understand
it and did understand it.

Then I looked at the
Web sites of some venture firms and the backgrounds
of the partners interested in information
technology: I have a tough time finding a
Ph.D. or even a BS STEM major. Gotta tell ya,
it would be one heck of an amazing BA major in
English and history who would or could
understand or review any of my technical work.

Several professions have professional peer review,
and I doubt that any of them, law, medicine,
engineering, tenure committees, have BA English and
history majors.

But, wait, it gets worse: If I accept an equity
check I will report to a Board of Directors (BoD)
that can fire me at anytime for any reason or
no reason, deny me my unvested stock,
get me in hot water with my illiquid
vested stock,
etc.

So, first BoD scenario: The company is up and
running, good revenue, first earnings, and
I, as founder, CEO, come to the BoD meeting
with the budget and list of projects.
There is a major new project, and I cover
how it will go. It's based on some
original work, I did, in applied mathematics
with some advanced prerequisites. Essentially
all of my high confidence in the project is
based squarely on the mathematics. So, I cover
the mathematics. The project has to do with,
say, ad targeting?

As I learned as a first year graduate student
in seminars with some of the best mathematicians
in the world, there is little so painful as
listening to and trying to understand
some advanced mathematics while missing
most of the prerequisites -- were talking
an unanesthetized, upper molar root canal
procedure along with a barbed wire enema
while being flogged with a cat of nine tails and
standing on a charcoal fire. What
the fun in that? I can see
nearly all the English and history majors
running, screaming from the board room
directly, do not pass GO, do not collect
$100, to the little boys room for
blowing all tubes at both ends. Some
BoD meeting. I see that disaster coming
right at me like an 80 MPH freight train
50 yards away. Bummer. BoD meeting over.

In information technology venture firms,
can we have some basic technical competence,
please, pretty please?

Else that must have
been one heck of an English and history major.
Gee, they covered the Gleason bound
for heap sort and O(n ln(n)) notation right along
with Hamlet? And they explained the importance
of P vs NP just before the Council of Trent?
And cache concurrency in multi-core processors
was, sure, along with Henry James, 'The Golden
Bowl' -- from the Prince. For the Internet,
they connected that with the
principle of The Great Natural Order?
Recursion in software connected with
the "child is the father of the man"?

And in the paper I published solving an old
problem in the constraint qualifications
of the Kuhn-Tucker conditions, I was not
the first with the ideas because
Sir Francis Bacon just had to have
known all that all along? And that every
closed, convex subset has a unique
element of minimum norm, that was
from Hammurabi, right?

Where does our technology get such nonsense?
Does this really mean that soon we will
be doing abdominal surgery with
smoking incense and rusty pocket knives?

That's enough -- I'm going to upchuck.