[mathgladiator]

From what interested me at the time (game engine, math, computational geometry, algebra) to what interested others like "how can computers help people become more effective", "how does this whole internet marketing thing work", etc...

My first successful business was about helping self storage owners attract customers. It wasn't super interesting, but I focused on making it work and learned many things that were not comfortable to learn. A core lesson I learned is that the first step is find people that have problems and help them solve it.

There is a value of having an entrepreneurial mindset even if one does not end up as the owner of a business, and one of my concerns is that the mindset of today is "get a job" rather than "help people with problems"

Over time, I have built a career by focusing on other people's problems first to build skills, trust, and knowledge. Now, I am effectively a principal working on really cool distributed system problems.

When I started, I had 20K debt in student loans and was living out of my car. However, my story is a case of Survivorship bias, and a difficult aspect is filtering out what was luck versus was could be applicable advice. I do think the focus on building relationships and helping people with their problems is key.

[gt_]

Do you have any thoughts on how to find people that have problems, which the searching party can fix?

[mathgladiator]

I talk to small business owners in community. Here is the thing, most small business owners are people with faults. They start well and know their business, but then conditions change. For instance, they feel they need a website, but they don't know why. Or, they need to be on facebook. Or, they want an edge.

The first thing to do is build the relationship and seek to understand their problems. The second thing is to look for the missing platform.

If the platform exists, then you can offer management services. An example of this managing Google Ad Words or Facebook Advertising.

If the platform doesn't exist, then it is opportunity to build something.

Usually, you can do both.