> 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.