An atlas for founders, operators & investors
The biggest opportunities are the problems no one has solved yet.
Open Problems maps the largest unmet needs in the business world — the friction quietly costing industries trillions — so you can build where it actually matters. One deeply-researched problem in your inbox, every week.
Free · One email a week · 9,000+ builders read it
The succession cliff
~2.9M profitable small businesses are owned by founders past retirement age — with no buyer and no successor in line.
- Value at risk
- $10T+
- Builders on it
- Almost none
- Window
- This decade
By the numbers
- $8Tin annual waste mapped
- 120+open problems tracked
- 9,000+founders & investors reading
- 52deep dives a year
The atlas
Six problems hiding in plain sight
Not trends. Not features. Structural, expensive, unglamorous problems that whole industries have learned to live with — and that the next generation of great companies will be built on.
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The succession cliff
Millions of profitable small businesses are owned by founders nearing retirement with no buyer lined up. A generation of value is set to evaporate — and no one has built the rails to transfer it.
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The trades are vanishing
Electricians, machinists, and welders are retiring faster than they're replaced. The physical economy runs on them — yet hiring, training, and matching them to work still happens on paper and phone calls.
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Healthcare's paperwork tax
Roughly a third of every healthcare dollar disappears into billing, coding, and prior-authorization friction. Patients wait, clinicians burn out, and the back office still runs on fax machines.
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Construction never got faster
Almost every industry has multiplied its output per worker since 1970. Construction hasn't. Projects run late and over budget by default, and the tools haven't caught up to the stakes.
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Who cares for the old?
The over-80 population is doubling while the caregiver workforce shrinks. Families are left to coordinate care by spreadsheet, and the systems meant to help are fragmented and overwhelmed.
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The uninsurable world
As climate volatility rises, whole regions and industries are becoming too risky to insure. Pricing, modeling, and covering 21st-century risk is a problem the 20th-century insurance stack can't solve.
The thesis
Why the biggest problems stay open
If these problems are so valuable, why are they still here? The same three reasons that scare everyone else off are exactly why they're worth your decade.
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They're unglamorous
Talent chases shiny consumer apps. The trillion-dollar problems hide inside unsexy industries — billing, logistics, trades, eldercare — that everyone scrolls past. Attention is the first moat.
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They're genuinely hard
Real problems sit behind regulation, entrenched incumbents, and physical-world complexity. That difficulty filters out the tourists — and leaves the field open for the few willing to do the hard part.
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They're mispriced
When everyone avoids a problem, the one team that cracks it inherits the entire market. Difficulty isn't the obstacle to the opportunity. Difficulty is the opportunity.
Voices
What readers do with it
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“I spent a year looking for something worth building. One issue gave me a shortlist I'd stake a decade on.”
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“We point our scouting team at this. It's the cleanest map of where real money and real meaning actually overlap.”
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“Most ‘trends’ newsletters are noise. This is the first one that sends me into rooms incumbents forgot existed.”
The briefing
Find your problem worth solving.
Join thousands of founders, operators, and investors who get one deeply-researched open problem in their inbox every week. No fluff, no hype — just where the next great companies will be built.
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