No, I'm not saying they are rare. I'm saying this:
1. Everyone is capable of having a billion-dollar idea
2. Not everyone will actually have such an idea
3. Such ideas are still a dime a dozen because even if only 10% of the world population has such an idea, that's still 700 million such ideas. That's a lot.
4. It's difficult to prove that an idea was a billion-dollar idea and the only way of proving is likely to either execute very well, or someone else executing on the same/similar-enough idea
Let's try to do some off-the-cuff statistics.
Let's assume the average person has 1 useful idea per week. And the average worldwide life expectancy is about 50 years. That makes 2608 useful ideas in their lifetime. Let's say a hundreth of a percent of those ideas are billion dollars ideas. That gives us roughly 3 billion-dollar ideas for every human in their lifetime.
So that's not very much on an individual basis, but using the same stats for the world population gives us roughly 7 million billion-dollar ideas every week.
This is a much better argument than your original one, but it's still off. Is there 7 million of any man-made things that are worth a billion dollars? I would argue that if something is worth a billion dollars, it's necessarily rare. It sounds like you mean to say "bright" ideas rather than billion dollar ideas.
But besides that, it takes more than sheer numbers to make the argument you're making. Seven hundred million ideas is a lot, but it's nothing compared to the 6.3 billion bad ideas out there.
You are correct in saying that it's difficult to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas. So people tend to get bitten by one of the many bad ideas out there and then throw their hands in the air and say "Ideas are worthless!"
Personally, I think that good ideas take far, far more work and intelligence than you're acknowledging. Even if everyone can have good ideas, and good ideas are common, it takes work to develop a good idea into one that is worth executing.
but youre using the population of the globe - try scaling that back to our sector a bit, and assume that there are a fraction of a % of the population involved in tech, and in a position to execute.
You're attributing the ability/capability and access to requisite resources to people who will never have such access/resources.
So, even looking at the overall population of the bay area - with the high % of tech people we do, it still is only a fraction of the ~7 million people here.
So, lets assume that 20% of the 7M people in the valley are in tech and actually pursuing this billion dollar idea - and I still think your assumptions are off. with 1.4 million people in tech, we certainly are not seeing as many ideas as you would suggest.
One question, why? Why would you do that scaling back?
And in my arguments I said that the having the opportunity and/or the right set of circumstances to execute on the idea is crucial to actually, you know, executing on the idea. It does not affect the value of the idea itself as a billion-dollar idea, just whether you'll ever be able to prove it or not.
1. Everyone is capable of having a billion-dollar idea
2. Not everyone will actually have such an idea
3. Such ideas are still a dime a dozen because even if only 10% of the world population has such an idea, that's still 700 million such ideas. That's a lot.
4. It's difficult to prove that an idea was a billion-dollar idea and the only way of proving is likely to either execute very well, or someone else executing on the same/similar-enough idea
Let's try to do some off-the-cuff statistics.
Let's assume the average person has 1 useful idea per week. And the average worldwide life expectancy is about 50 years. That makes 2608 useful ideas in their lifetime. Let's say a hundreth of a percent of those ideas are billion dollars ideas. That gives us roughly 3 billion-dollar ideas for every human in their lifetime.
So that's not very much on an individual basis, but using the same stats for the world population gives us roughly 7 million billion-dollar ideas every week.