Tech startups start with a question. What's yours?

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Tech startups start with a question. What's yours?

I have long been interested in the concept of delivering web applications as powerful as their desktop counterparts. Particularly with regards to mashups, which are always at the mercy of the same origin policy. However, I never made any progress towards advancing the state of the art until I asked myself a seemingly simple question:

"Is it possible to execute arbitrary privileged script in any browser on any platform?"

As it turns out, the answer is yes (even though it's more difficult than one might at first imagine). The key takeaway is that once I had phrased it as a question, merely as a hypothetical whim, it became something actionable - something that I had to know, to figure out, to solve.

I recently read Paul Graham's classic essay Ideas for Startups, in which he espouses asking a provocative question (technically speaking) rather than setting out with a preconceived "idea". I definitely think he makes a good point, and in retrospect, this is exactly what I needed to move forward.

I don't know yet whether trephine will succeed as a venture, but I can say with certainty that I've gotten farther along in this project than any "idea" I've had before.

I urge anyone wanting to start a project or company to begin with an "is it possible" kind of question. You now know mine, what's yours?