[ErikAugust]

I think the problem lies in the fact that to "disrupt" the right industries, you need to have some experience in dinosaur industries/companies that could use better solutions.

Most young, talented developers never held a job inside one of those places in their lives, hence why they build Facebook clones instead.

Honestly, seek out some soul-sucking corporate job for a summer and see what you could do to improve the operations with software/hardware.

[jacoblyles]

If you're in anything but consumer tech, then domain expertise is vital. And if you are in consumer tech then you have 100 other startups doing the exact same thing you are, and domain expertise is still pretty useful.