Industry expertise is certainly an advantage and attractive to investors, but by no means is a prerequisite for success. There are lots of other very important

Industry expertise is certainly an advantage and attractive to investors, but by no means is a prerequisite for success. There are lots of other very important and influential factors in a startup's success other than your industry background. For example, I actually interned at an analytics startup in the facebook gaming space (they now sell an analytics suite to game developers). The company originally started out producing god knows what hardware devices, then transitioned to making apps for Facebook. In the midst of making apps, they found that there was a need for a different type of analytics system (traditional web analytics models are pageview centric, and don't work well with "social", which is now regarded as user/cohorted user class centric). So once again they pivoted and developed an analytics platform for the facebook platform. I don't believe anyone on the core team had any analytics experience, but they were all super smart and ambitious. It was a market and timing opportunity, and they got started by solving a problem they themselves faced on a daily basis.