By 'tough problem', do you mean something that requires a lot of 'breakthrough new science'? And or has a huge impact on the world? As far as the former goes, how technical a company is may change throughout its lifetime. For example, at its inception, Google's algorithm was definitely an improvement over what Yahoo did, but didn't exactly not come out of the blue ( the story doesn't really bear repeating here). I think as these companies grow, the need to improve their service and just its sheer size imposes high demand for developing 'new stuff'. So maybe a lot of companies that are deemed 'trivial' today just havn't grown to the point where they need to solve some 'tough technical problems.'

A second note about just the ability to tackle hard problems. I think there's a deeper cycle going on here: discoveries in the traditional sciences that fundamentally change how we see the world, and manipulate more parts of it. Most of the tech advancement in the 20th century ( in the field of computers anyways ) can be traced to new ideas in physics developed in the early 20th century. So I hypothesize that we are a in a lull period where 'nobody' has figured out how to apply what we know about the world in drastically different ways. ( I don't read enough literature to say that no one in the last x decades has made discoveries as significant as those made in the few decades prior to that )

As far as impact on the world goes, sometimes at a company's inception, it's not so obvious that it'll change the (1st) world in significant ways. A pretty computer for the select few who knows what a computer is? A website to buy old books? which by the way looked like this:

http://library.corporate-ir.net/library/17/176/176060/mediai...

So I think when a company has a potential to shift the world into a different ( yet to be conceived ) state, then it is hard to measure its significance by standards of our world.

To bring the ramble to its final stretch, I think the bar to start a company nowadays is a lot lower. And despite how worldly a late teens early 20s person may be, if (s)he had the time and resource to learn programming (or some other discipline), then (s)he probably spend his/her entire life in school, and the problems (s)he experienced, though significant in the context of his/her life thus far, may appear 'trivial' to the greater world at large. So the space of problems (s)he is motivated to solve is just far smaller than an older dude.

And with that I finally shut up.

You should read Paul Graham's essay 'Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas' http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Thanks for the link. I had read that before, very good post.

Well, for one, many really tough interesting problems lack a clear way to monetize the solution.

I couldn't agree more: It's either no clear way to monetize or very hard to no access, such as the healthcare market. In healthcare everybody agrees that it is "ripe" for disruption and that to do well you need to do good. But there's just no access to it, with all the bureaucracy. This implies that investment need is high and iteration periods are long. (Note: I'm from Germany. But while the US system is much more open than over here, it also super tough in the US to launch a "meaningful" (read: not a fitness/recreational) healthcare business.)

They are talking, they are just not that loud... or may be you're "listening" in a wrong place.

Can you give me an example of a tough, interesting problem?