Discovery

When picking a hard, important problem to build a company around, you should focus on areas where you are uniquely adept - both to improve probability of success, and to do the problem justice.

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about."

It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.

When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one.