The Problems That Inspired the World’s Biggest Startups + 15 Problems you can build a company around in 2026 (with AI)
Most people study solutions.
Great founders study problems.
Airbnb didn’t start with “let’s build a marketplace for short-term rentals.”
Stripe didn’t start with “let’s build payments infrastructure.”
OpenAI didn’t start with “let’s ship a chatbot.”
They all started with something much more primitive:
“This is broken. And nobody has fixed it properly.”
In this piece, I’ll do two things:
Break down the core problems that inspired some of the biggest tech companies in the world (Airbnb, Stripe, Amazon, OpenAI)
Share 15 unsolved problems that I believe can still produce decacorns heading into 2026
If you’re a founder, this is how you should be training your brain.
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