Personally its the idea that’s worth the money, not the implementation, an implementation can be copied very fast but if someone has the idea protected then its worth more.
My thoughts on this have been explained much better by Paul Graham of Ycombinator.
An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you’ll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.
You say that the idea is more valuable because the implementation can be copied but the idea can be copied as well.
A PHP CMS is an easy thing to do but building an Ellislab is very hard. Ellislab certainly was not first. They may not even have the best CMS. They didn’t just build a solid CMS, they built a solid company.
Yahoo and a bunch of other companies already had a search engine when Google appeared on the scene. And do you think that Google would have had other founders if lots of other people knew about the plans? Part of the reason Google got so big was because nobody took them or search seriously.
Is Youtube really a unique idea? Putting video on the internet? Again, do you think history would be any different if they were to mouth off to everyone about their idea to do video on the internet?
There are so many ideas and things to do out there that the idea doesn’t matter. You have an unlimited bin of ideas you can grab to become successful. Nobody cares about your idea because ideas are so plentiful. People only care about your idea when you actually make it work, then people say “why didn’t I think of that.”
I have lots of ideas. If you steal my idea and make it work better than I can then I will just start working on the next idea in line.
Wow, I totally did not expect to write something this long. I must be procrastinating. 😉