As Hamming says in his excellent essay "You and Your Research", there are two components to an "important problem": an objective one and a subjective one. The

As Hamming says in his excellent essay "You and Your Research", there are two components to an "important problem": an objective one and a subjective one. The objective requirement: in the success-case the project must have a large impact on the community (in Hamming's case, physicists; for strtups, an initial market / society at large) The subjective requirement: the researcher must have "an attack" [0], i.e. a credible approach to a solution that others probably have not tried yet. For the vast majority of SF Bay Area founders of tiny software companies, they have no "attack" on cancer. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html