> It's hard to start with a technical ability and find a startup opportunity. That is how we decided to start Quantcast - we had a spreadsheet of business ideas that might leverage our technical backgrounds. But it's a difficult path.

Really interesting point. I am much in the same boat as you, I am interest in working on highly technical, mostly systems related challenges.

However, I know that the goal of a company is to generate return for their shareholder. At the mean time, startup is a lot of hard, thankless, and grungy work (that makes tooling around with autoconf seem fun by comparison): unless you're genuinely passionate about the problem(s) you're solving, it isn't worth it.

So until a deeply technical idea strikes me, I'll hold off on taking that jump.

Here's one that came up in another thread: rewrite the core engine of MongoDB, yet keep all the existing API's and libraries.

You could call it BongoDB. B for better. You can capture all their market share based mostly on technical prowess.

Some of the problems are documented here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3837772

Here is one example: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/12/mongograph-qa