Make money doing the work you believe in
I was writing an article just now, and it reminded me of the perspective that some million-dollar ideas are worth twenty bucks.
Entrepreneur and author Derek Sivers once proposed a simple, brutal equation that every founder should paste onto their monitor. He argued that ideas are just a multiplier, while execution is the actual value.
It looks like this:
Awful Idea: -1
Brilliant Idea: 20
No Execution: $1
Brilliant Execution: $10,000,000
If we see, this is so reasonable and unforgiving. If you have a brilliant idea (20) but no execution ($1), your business is worth $20.
If you have a so-so idea (5) but brilliant execution ($10,000,000), you’re sitting on a $50 million empire.
We have gone through the ghost era of search engines.
In 1998, the "idea" of a search engine wasn't a secret.
AltaVista had the technology
Yahoo had the traffic
Go to .com had the monetisation model (pay-per-click)
Google wasn't a new idea. It was the 14th player in a crowded room.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't win because they had a secret document locked in a vault; they won because their execution, the PageRank algorithm and a radically clean UX were a 1,000x multiplier on a concept everyone else was already doing.
They didn't hide. They outran.
Same happens to the founders, thinking their idea will be stolen if they are pitching in an open room.
The biggest risk to your startup isn't someone "stealing" your multiplier. It’s that your execution value stays at $1 because you're too afraid to talk to the market.
When you refuse to share your pitch without an NDA:
You kill your feedback loop: you build features based on assumptions, not reality.
You signal amateurism: real builders know that the secret is the 80-hour work week, not the slide deck.
You lose the lead: While you're obsessing over legal watermarks, a competitor with a weaker idea is already onboarding their 100th customer.
So, it’s on you as the founder.
If you think your idea is worth a million, build something and then ship aggressively.
If you are doing so, you will make it. & No VC from Europe or the US can steal it.