You’ve got a few choices:

1. Contact them and get a job. If you’ve been thinking about this for years, you have domain expertise to bring to the table.

2. Use their funding and launch as leverage to raise your own money. If someone invested in them, that means smart money (all money thinks it’s smart) is going into the industry. Use that to raise angel/VC

3. Find another idea to pursue and wish these folks the best. They are making a go of something that, for one reason or another, you weren’t able to. Like you said, it’s good for humanity. Great.

But really, ideas are easy. There is not, nor should there be, any prize for having a good idea. Bringing a decent idea to market is far more noble than having the best idea ever.

I'm not asking for an award for "the idea" I'm saying it's frustrating that despite my best efforts I couldn't get the capital to execute it.

As the parent says, ideas are easy. Executing them is difficult, and figuring out early that an idea is "out of reach" is part of the process to moving on to another idea.

Two annecdotes; A customer came to us with an idea, but no funding. We didn't gave the ability to simply do the work for free. So we went looking for funding, and also invested some time in the domain space. Short answer, _someone_ will make a mountain of cash from the concept on day. But who that is will be done what arbitrary, and will rely on a lot of luck. We gracefully left the project (and as far as I know so did the customer.)

Bear in mind that ideas are not special. I can have 10 ideas a day. Figuring out which to do, and which to let go is important.

After school it was "clear to me" that Energy would be a good sector. Alternatives to gasoline were the future. Solar technology, converting ICE engines to run on hydrogen etc.

I had no clear path into that area, and no real skills beyond "ideas" so I went into programming instead. Turns out I was 30 years too early. Now solar is huge, and electric cars are a thing. (ocean wave energy is still waiting for its day in the sun.)

But I don't regret passing on that career. I've had other ideas and done other things.

My point is - don't obsess over "one great idea". You had one, cool. Let it go, have another. Get a real job. Save some cash. Keep thinking. Practice the art of taking (small) ideas to market.

If you hold onto ideas loosely, another will be along soon.

Seeing this play out convinced me that ideas are easy, it is execution that makes them spread. Having been able to come up with so many ideas also gave me the confidence and reassurance that I could monetize one of those ideas. Eventually, I picked an idea from that list and started my venture.

So, my advice is -- do not be bogged down by the fact that someone else arrived there first. There are thousands of product / service categories where there are multiple players in the market. It just means that the idea is valid and others also see business value in the idea. You can focus on how you can differentiate your offering in terms of features, price, geography, support and so many other dimensions, if you wish to pursue the same idea.

What would you have done if the competitor came up after you had launched?

If you strongly feel there is no point pursuing the idea, there are other ideas you could pursue for your business.

Please don't beat yourself up and get frustrated. The world is a very large place with tons of opportunities, if you look hard enough.

Just to share one idea that I almost took to completion and then dropped - It was a few years ago and Slack was the top collaboration suite. I had an idea for building a unified chat/messaging tool to integrate text, images, audio, video in a single collaborative tool. I used IPFS to keep the data distributed on the peer nodes (i.e., completely serverless and p2p). Microsoft Teams had just launched. I dropped the idea knowing fully well that Teams would soon surpass Slack (and sure enough they did recently).

A good thing that came out of that was I used the video part of the tool to pivot to a different product.

It is a perplexing aspect of reality that every situation can be read + or -. Looked at positively, your idea is now validated by people betting money on it. This is something you include in your pitch to investors, and then also tell them you have had 8 years of deep thinking (did you?) about the business around the idea.

"If you can't beat them, join them."

If it is a good idea and possibly lucrative, why not try to join the company?

IMHO a good idea is not enough. It needs to be a good idea for you (for your situation, expertise). Without knowing you at all, reading about trading options to finance an idea seems like a red flag. Maybe there is a more approachable idea out there that is perfect for you.

Depending on what that company is like, this could be very strong validation of your ideas.

>I want get rich doing something important.

Either one is usually out of reach for most people.

The most likely way to get rich is to be born that way, OTOH you can always start doing something important within your means.

How important can something be anyway, regardless of your means if it's important enough you're going to put in maximum dedication I would think.

That's the direction I would go right away within my power, and leave the being born rich to those whose odds are more in their favor.

>$300k/yr salary rich

>yacht rich.

Pretty soon you're talking some serious money either way.

So on first impression I would think neither one is exactly within reach in the short term if you're in financial ruin.

Also reminding you that nobody knows which would be the richer highwayman, whether it would be the yachtsman or not.

I would consider working for them as a salesman if they're decent since you were going to have to be a hell of a salesman if you had gotten your own company doing this same thing.

Might as well work on becoming unruined doing something where you've had the eye on the prize for so long, even though the necessary good fortune just did not line up.

It'd be one thing to have been defeated by a competitor, quite another to have never even gotten off the ground. Incidentally, losing money trading options is in no way a failed funding round.

It's hard to recommend anything generic and anyway, it's no longer a secret.