I disagree. Sometimes it's because we see other people frustrated with something and think we can help, or more generally because we had an idea to provide value to some group of people without necessarily being in that group of people ourselves.
At the very least, another person's pain causes you pain via empathy or some sort of chain reaction. I had a successful website business that was born solely out of a friend's constant requests for updates. I hacked a CMS together and a business was born. His pain was getting his website updated–my pain was him bugging me.
Kalanick may have had a hard time hailing a cab...but that probably wasn't inconvenient enough to want him to devote his entire life to building a company solving that one specific problem that he randomly had in his life.
"Early on, when a reporter asked me how I came up with the idea for Anybots, I answered honestly that I made a list of all the ideas I thought might really change the world in the next 20 years, and picked the one I thought I could contribute most to. His eyes glazed over. It's unprintable."
A lot of people seem to take the "romantic origin story" as a template to follow, and waste a lot of time as a result.
Personal pain or recognition of a pattern of problem(s) that could be solved? This is an interesting point because if you limit yourself to simply solving your personal problems, these problems have to be experienced by either a large number of people (usually peers). Otherwise there is no real chance of a business.
I'd prefer to put this as, "solving a personal problem that many* other people face"*.
Uhh, we're all the same species living in one of a handful of large societies. Our personal or work problems are likely shared by thousands, millions, possibly even billions of other people.
No one is that weird or special of a snowflake.
I thought to myself "what is more addictive a product than big tobacco?". We all need food, and society is slowly changing with megatrends that make feeding yourself at home more of a hassle for quite a few of us (aging populations, people living solo or just with one partner, weird hours/urban living, commute fatigue, international travel, etc.). So ... why not try to automate a reasonable solution with fresh ingredients and mass-appeal? So far we haven't had problems getting people on board with the idea or menus, though some of our chef friends remain skeptical!
Gee, they must have sold a bootload of boots then!
> Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush. The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the rush was Samuel Brannan, a tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the goldfields. Just as the rush began he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and re-sold them at a substantial profit.
> Some gold-seekers made a significant amount of money. On average, half the gold-seekers made a modest profit, after taking all expenses into account; economic historians have suggested that white miners were more successful than black, Indian, or Chinese miners. Most late arrivals made little or wound up losing money.