In my startup journey, I've seen many fellow founders and aspiring entrepreneurs trying to incorporate the next shiny technology into their startup or build off of popular trends in the market. Although a few may find success by trend following, at least anecdotally, I feel like founders who have expertise in the field they are operating their startups in have a much higher rate of success. A good example of this would be Zoom which was founded by Eric Yuan in 2012. Initially Zoom had trouble finding investors as many felt that the videotelephony market was already completely saturated and dominated by big players. Having more than a decade of experience in the videotelephony market through his work at Cisco and WebEx, he knew that businesses faced problems with video conferencing via both mobile and desktops. When he pitched his idea to Cisco for a mobile-friendly video system, it was turned down. So he left Cisco with about 40 engineers and his mobile-friendly video conferencing system idea ultimately became Zoom. Yuan was able to take an iteration of the problem of mobile-friendly video conferencing in an industry that he had a decade of experience in and turn it into a $20 billion+ company. He knew that customers were facing the real problem of not being able to join a video conference via their mobiles and created Zoom to focus on solving this problem.