The Ideation Flywheel: A mental model for deciding which startup ideas to pursue
This 'focus on problems' attitude is interesting to me given that the founders of  companies like Facebook, Apple and Amazon never set out to solve specific problems, but rather found cool new applications for maturing technologies.I think an equally valid approach is to start building something that you think should exist in the world, and bypass the "solution in search of a problem" issue by making sure your product has plenty of contact with reality. E.g. if no one is interested in an early version of the product, then you're probably going down the wrong path.