Your friends are hiding their best ideas from you

Back in college, the final project in our JavaScript class was to build a website. We were a group of four, and we built the best website in class. It was for a restaurant called the Coral Reef. We found pictures online, created a menu, and settled on a solid theme. I was taking a digital art class in parallel, so I used my Photoshop skills to place our logo inside pictures of our fake restaurant. All of a sudden, something clicked. We were admiring our website on a CRT monitor when my classmate pulled me aside. She had an idea. A business idea.

An idea so great that she couldn't share it with the rest of the team. She whispered, covering her mouth with one hand so a lip reader couldn't steal this fantastic idea: "what if we build websites for people?"

This was the 2000s, of course it was a fantastic idea. The perfect time to spin up an online business after a market crash. But what she didn't know was that, while I was in class in the mornings, my afternoons were spent scouring Craigslist and building crappy websites for a hundred to two hundred dollars a piece. I wasn't going to share my measly spoils. If anything, this was the perfect time to build that kind of service. That's a great idea, I said.

There is something satisfying about having an idea validated. A sort of satisfaction we get from the acknowledgment. We are smart, and our ideas are good. Whenever someone learned that I was a developer, they felt this urge to share their "someday" idea. It's an app, a website, or some technology I couldn't even make sense of. I used to try to dissect these ideas, get to the nitty-gritty details, scrutinize them. But that always ended in hostility. "Yeah, you don't get it. You probably don't have enough experience" was a common response when I didn't give a resounding yes.

I don't get those questions anymore, at least not framed in the same way. I have worked for decades in the field, and I even have a few failed start-ups under my belt. I'm ready to hear your ideas. But that job has been taken, not by another eager developer with even more experience, or maybe a successful start-up on their résumé. No, not a person. AI took this job.

Somewhere behind a chatbot interface, an AI is telling one of your friends that their idea is brilliant. Another AI is telling them to write out the full details in a prompt and it will build the app in a single stroke. That friend probably shared a localhost:3000 link with you, or a Lovable app, last year. That same friend was satisfied with the demo they saw then and has most likely moved on.

In the days when I stood as a judge, validating an idea was rarely what sparked a business. The satisfaction was in the telling. And today, a prompt is rarely a spark either. In fact, the prompt is not enough. My friends share a link to their ChatGPT conversation as proof that their idea is brilliant.

I can't deny it, the robot has already spoken. I'm not the authority on good or bad ideas. I've called ideas stupid that went on to make millions of dollars. (A ChatGPT wrapper for SMS, for instance.)

A decade ago, I was in Y Combinator's Startup School. In my batch, there were two co-founders: one was the developer, and the other was the idea guy. In every meeting, the idea guy would come up with a brand new idea that had nothing to do with their start-up. The instructor tried to steer him toward being the salesman, but he wouldn't budge. "My talent is in coming up with ideas," he said.

We love having great ideas. We're just not interested in starting a business, because that's what it actually takes. A friend will joke, "here's an idea" then proceeds to tell me their idea. "If you ever build it, send me my share." They are not expecting me to build it. They are happy to have shared a great idea.

As for my classmate, she never spoke of the business again. But over the years, she must have sent me at least a dozen clients. It was a great idea after all.

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