At various points in my journey, I've felt genuinely uninspired by the work in front of me.
I know that's a privileged thing to say. But I also believe that if you recognize you have real potential, real competence, you have a responsibility to aim it at something worthy of it.
If everyone with an entrepreneurial instinct ends up building things that make money but don't matter, the world becomes a less interesting place. Not a worse place, necessarily. Just smaller than it could be.
I'm not against bubble tea shops or restaurants. They're not bad businesses. Many of them are great businesses. SMEs are the backbone of the economy and the lifeblood of communities. The people who build them should be proud!
But is that what you want to do with your one, finite, non-renewable life on this planet?
If the answer is yes, go do it. Do it well.
This essay is for the others.
The people I'm writing for are statistically rare. Most people don't think this way, and even fewer are willing to pay the price that comes with thinking this way. There's also an uncomfortable truth here: to even consider whether your work is meaningful, you need to have already solved the earlier levels of Maslow's pyramid. Food, shelter, security. You need a floor beneath your feet before you can look at the ceiling.
So if you're reading this, you're probably fortunate. Or perhaps, cursed never to be satisfied with the small things in life? Because once you feel it, you can't unfeel it. That sense that you're meant for something bigger.
That there's a problem out there with your name on it. A problem where you won't mind dedicating precious years of your life to, even if that means you might burn in the process, in the hope you will feel more alive than ever.
That building something incremental, something safe, something that merely extracts value rather than creating it, would be a kind of quiet betrayal of yourself.
That's not a comfortable truth to carry around.
But if you carry it, you need somewhere to go.
You need a place where that instinct is treated as signal, not noise. A place where the problems are real, the stakes are high, and the people around you are trying to fly closer to the sun, even knowing full well it might burn their wings.
That's why I built Questd.
It's a platform where we curate high-impact, genuinely hard problems, sourced from VCs, researchers, institutions, and people who have spent their careers staring at what's broken. A place where you can search for inspiration, go deep on a domain, fork a problem and make it your own, or find the one thing you've been circling around for years without realizing it.
I built it for myself first. I needed it. And I figured if I needed it, there are others out there who do too.
The world gets better when the people who could work on hard things actually do. That's just how progress works. Someone has to go first. I hope Questd gives you what has been missing for you to do the work of your life.