To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems

my problem is the whole development lifecyle, there's no "code n run" anymore, when you have to continually deploy and test.

So build your own things and do it your own way. I find that is what works best for me. Put food on the table through contracting, build my own things around the contracts to provide recurring revenue. Keep going till it's enough. I hated everything about office culture and have never been happier. Right now for me that's about 20-30hrs per week freelance to make a great income, and I spend 20-30hrs per week working on my own projects.

When I took my optimization and design class in college, our professor would tell us "It's always smarter to find the market then design the product, rather than designing the product and finding a market for it".

What I this misses (in it's rather click-baity title) is that most problems are not going to be companies that are worth $1b. There is a very small slice of problems that end up at $1b. Most, I would imagine, end up being one time problems that are worth very little.

If people were more open about their problems, we wouldn't need to find them in the first place.