Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.

I interned at Miramax and subsequently at Paramount because I was really curious about the future of entertainment - how were we going to get films online? While the inspiration for Box didn't come from that experience directly, it was very obvious that bigger businesses had a lot of slow processes and cumbersome technology.

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

Read these 3 books - Crossing the Chasm, Innovators Dilemma and Behind the Cloud.

You can look at the cost structure of an incumbent company and discover: where are they not going to be able to drop their prices... because that business model is fundamental to the existence of the company.

Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's.

You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.