I understand where he's coming from as an investor, but it's kind of a shame that there doesn't seem to be a mechanism by which these sorts of features can be t

I understand where he's coming from as an investor, but it's kind of a shame that there doesn't seem to be a mechanism by which these sorts of features can be turned into reality. Companies can't really accept unsolicited ideas from the general public due to the IP can-of-worms that that opens, and it's a huge amount of mostly wasted effort to build a company that's essentially a clone of another firm but with this one extra feature. Unfortunately you can't un-know an idea once someone tells you it and you decide it's not worth what they wanted for it. And nine times out of ten it's probably not worth what they wanted for it in the first place. So maybe the problem is inherent. One probably-unworkable solution would be a sort of IP escrow company, where, say, Facebook tells them every idea they've ever had, and when an unsolicited idea comes in, they compare it against the list and advise Facebook whether it's worth paying for. But conflicts of interest in that sort of setup are probably unavoidable.