Those big problem attacking businesses are out there, they're just often too busy to write blog posts about it! :) That said, I'm one of those grad school drop

Those big problem attacking businesses are out there, they're just often too busy to write blog posts about it! :) That said, I'm one of those grad school dropouts who's stumbled into the whole trying to bootstrap a hard problems only business. Its a lot of work! I'm lucky that my family is based in NYC so that I can reduce my living costs plus do hard problems only consulting part time while spending the rest of my time working on building my tech products @Wellposed. There are uncountably many high value problems you can try to build an interesting business around. Just look at any Specialized / niche high value industry and ask "can we build better tools and how valuable would those be?". You should choose a domain where you'd enjoy talking with/getting to know potential customers personally. if there are other folks attacking the same question domain+combo, ideally they should be smart folks you respect who are solving the problem with a different combination of tradeoffs so that the products are complementary rather than substitutes. Oh, and you should be OK with building a satisfactory product taking at least a year of hard work, constant learning , and feeling stupid because you keep on seeing better ways to do every thing. Or at least that's sort of the meta pattern behind how I'm operating at Wellposed. Its hard work, I get to feel stupid in the always learning more sort of way, and its the most fun I've ever had. I'll find out towards the middle / end of this year if my ideas and process bear out on my first hard problem domain. I'm terrified and excited. Either I'll quickly be trying to figure out a sane hiring process, or I'll be job hunting with an interesting engineering and consulting portfolio accumulated over the preceding year, and I don't know which outcome is more likely! That said, entrepreneurship is hard work and gets in the way of spending focused time on engineering. Good thing I'm a tad extroverted.