Domain-Specific Experts
The hidden skills behind great companies
In life, we encounter people who understand specific and unusual things that others don’t. Their interests are so unique that you can’t help but wonder how they became drawn to them. The more you dig, the more you realize their curiosity stems from something beyond traditional channels. Often, it’s a mix of intense curiosity and frustration rooted in their earlier experiences, leading them down a path that feels like play to them but appears as unusual (and tiring) work to others. As you delve deeper, you start to see that the problems these people are solving are more significant than we initially realize.
These are the domain-specific experts.
Domain-specific experts learn through experience. Often through specific work that combine with other work. It could be someone who worked in media, and transitioned to software engineering, and then finance. Combining all skills to offer something that no one employer would appreciate. Their histories can seem so odd that most employers wouldn’t know where to place them. However, the real value lies on how they combine this knowledge to produce something useful to the world, which makes most of them illiquid in the traditional job marketplace. They realize that they don’t have one traditional offering that is clear to any employer, and so they end up tinkering on various projects until they develop something unique and special that people need. There is a good article about careers that fall within this realm written by Vaishnav Sunil where he talks about illiquid vs. liquid careers [read here]. It is worth the read if you want to dive deeper into this topic.
These are skills so specific that, early in your career, you might find them useless but later realize their value. They are usually acquired through trade.
Examples:
Site selection for retail businesses
Sales
Storytelling
Highly bespoke craftmanship (like watch makers, vintage car servicers, and specialized tailors)
Supply sourcing and negotiation (an essential skill for fast-growing brick-and-mortar food businesses)
Product design and development
Applying incentive frameworks to maximize performance (beyond the teachings of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, I’ve found limited resources on their practical application in business)
Talent recognition (spotting talent is almost equivalent to spotting good early investments)
Hyper localized business knowledge and frameworks
Building trust
We encountered such a situation when setting up our roastery. We brought in a roaster to advise us on the setup and training. As we were working on the exhaust system, he stopped and said, “The exhaust is too high up.” We didn’t immediately understand what he meant, so he explained, “If it’s too high, the smoke comes back in and creates a bitter taste in the coffee.”
At that moment, we thought: This guy knows what he’s doing—this insight must come from experience. He had likely set up his own roastery and made the mistake of positioning the exhaust too high. This knowledge was so specific that it’s not something you’d typically spend time learning, despite its significant impact on the roasting process. Without his experience—trial, error, and failure—we wouldn’t have known that an improperly positioned exhaust could ruin the coffee's flavor.
What stood out to us was that this critical piece of information wasn’t mentioned in the roaster manual. Yet that single insight profoundly impacted our business, helping us avoid bitter coffee.
Another example is site selection for mass-market retail businesses. Many people like to think there’s a “formula,” but there isn’t one. Site selection is an art, learned through experience and by understanding location and the many factors that drive demand based on key establishments that surround the area.
In our bread business, we’ve learned this through trial and error. Some sites looked ideal but produced meager returns, while others we thought might underperform ended up exceeding expectations. We started with a set of factors we believed drove demand, refining them as we gained traction.
While a checklist can help, it’s not static. It evolves. Over time, there are sites we simply feel will perform well, based on our experience and intuition. This is stuff you don’t learn in school but is probably the most important skill for mass market retail businesses. Watching someone who has this experience explain why a site works is like watching magic.
I find it funny when people claim to have formulas for success. You hear it in the investment management business too: “We have a formula that works.” When you hear this, be wary.
What I’ve realized is that the best entrepreneurs I’ve met have some form of specific knowledge, often a combination of different types of domain-specific expertise. Some of this knowledge is so niche that you can’t imagine it being taught in any school, despite the immense value it brings.
Why is this the case? When reviewing a CV or meeting an outstanding graduate from one of the top schools, one might assume they have the knowledge to tackle the world. In reality, the world is shaped by countless forms of domain-specific knowledge. It’s so diverse and unique that no amount of case studies can capture them all.
This reminds me of the two types of surgeons described by Nassim Taleb in Skin in the Game:
Say you had the choice between two surgeons of similar rank in the same department in some hospital. The first is highly refined in appearance; he wears silver-rimmed glasses, has a thin built, delicate hands, a measured speech, and elegant gestures. His hair is silver and well combed. He is the person you would put in a movie if you needed to impersonate a surgeon. His office prominently boasts an Ivy League diploma, both for his undergraduate and medical schools.
The second one looks like a butcher; he is overweight, with large hands, uncouth speech and an unkempt appearance. His shirt is dangling from the back. No known tailor in the East Coast of the U.S. is capable of making his shirt button at the neck. He speaks unapologetically with a strong New Yawk accent, as if he wasn’t aware of it. He even has a gold tooth showing when he opens his mouth. The absence of diploma on the wall hints at the lack of pride in his education: he perhaps went to some local college. In a movie, you would expect him to impersonate a retired bodyguard for a junior congressman, or a third-generation cook in a New Jersey cafeteria.
Now if I had to pick, I would overcome my suckerproneness and take the butcher any minute. Even more: I would seek the butcher as a third option if my choice was between two doctors who looked like doctors. Why? Simply the one who doesn’t look the part, conditional of having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception. And if we are lucky enough to have people who do not look the part, it is thanks to the presence of some skin in the game, the contact with reality that filters out incompetence, as reality is blind to looks.
This is an interesting point by Taleb. He goes on to say that in his trading career (in complex derivatives), some of his best traders neither looked the part nor had the typical credentials.
He continues by saying:
When the results come from dealing directly with reality rather than through the agency of commentators, image matters less, even if it correlates to skills. But image matters quite a bit when there is hierarchy and standardized “job evaluation”. Consider the chief executive officers of corporations: they not just look the part, but they even look the same.
In any type of activity or business divorced from the direct filter of skin in the game, the great majority of people know the jargon, play the part, are intimate with the cosmetic details, but are clueless about the subject.
You can read the full article here. It’s well worth the read.
During my early years, I believed that looking the part meant having some sort of skill—some way to stand out against the competition. In fact, a significant portion of a professional’s career consists of “playing the part,” to the extent that mastering it often matters more for career advancement than actual output. Polished CVs, tailored suits, eloquent emails, and sleek pitch decks. Even if you look at career centers in universities, there is a “process” one should follow to get a job, a certain etiquette and method where you have to play the part to stand out and win.
It wasn’t until later that I realized true value comes not from appearances, but from action.
If you compare an entrepreneur to a professional corporate climber, you’ll notice key differences. Entrepreneurs don’t try to eliminate all risk before taking action. They won’t spend hours overcomplicating situations or relying on “experts” to validate their ideas. Nor do they seek individuals with special degrees to lend credibility to their concepts.
Instead, entrepreneurs identify pain points through personal experience and address them by testing solutions and facing risks head-on. They experiment until they achieve a minimum viable product—or they don’t. If they fail, they move on and continue tinkering.
Because of this real-life “testing,” most entrepreneurs approach people and situations from unique and unusual angles, often making them appear eccentric to others. Some of the best founders I’ve met were just “weird.” Their eccentricities made them stand out as oddballs in the eyes of society.
A prime example of a true entrepreneur is Naval Ravikant, chairman and former CEO of AngelList. He is also an early investor in companies like Uber, Foursquare, Twitter, Postmates, SnapLogic, and Yammer.
In the Almanack of Naval Ravikant, he goes on to say:
“Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned”
What does this mean? It means that the skills often found in successful entrepreneurs are unusual yet highly useful in specific situations. These skills aren’t taught—because if they were, everyone would have the opportunity to learn them, making the skill commoditized. Instead, these abilities are so unique that they are likely acquired through rare life experiences specific to the individual. It’s similar to the surgeon Taleb describes, who looks like a third-generation cook in a New Jersey cafeteria.
This is why, when people ask me what advice I would give to recent graduates about their careers, I am more inclined to suggest gaining experience at early-stage companies through internships. Jump around different startups, but focus on learning key skills in finance, marketing, and sales.
“Why risk your career working for a company with a high chance of failure?” most parents would ask. But think about it—most startups need strong generalists, people willing to step outside their immediate roles to help their company cross the “valley of death” (the point at which most companies fail). This is no easy feat, and the experience often builds scar tissue.
Even if you fail, as long as you work in an emerging field within the startup world, there will always be opportunities for you. You’ll have built a trusted network of colleagues who value your contributions and might rely on you as they continue experimenting with their careers. You’ll be one of the few people they think of when they expand their ventures elsewhere.
This is exactly what happened with the PayPal Mafia. In Reid Hoffman’s book The Startup of You, he frequently mentions jobs he took for free to build both his experience and network.
“Over time, you can and should broaden your aperture. Successful people often become more generalist over time because they form the ability to make connections between the different specialized experience and knowledge under their purview. We’re not suggesting you avoid cultivating a broad skill set over the entire course of your career. We are instead arguing that it’s more often the case that a bright, ambitious person struggles because they don’t know at least one functional area really well.”
Notice that, at the beginning of the quote, he says “Over time.” In the book, Hoffman mentions that the best entrepreneurs often start with one specialized skill and then bridge their curiosity to explore unrelated ventures and jobs, eventually forming a broader skill set to offer the world. Along the way, they are often seen as job jumpers by typical corporate standards, falling into the category of outcasts. Yet, they persist, continuing down this path of tinkering and exploration.
If you’re young, you have time to pick yourself up after failures. On the flip side, success in a startup could mean extreme wealth. This creates a scenario with low downside and high upside.
Yet today, many people still encourage the typical gold-plated risk-free careers in investment banking and consulting—two career paths with no skin in the game. These professions sell services but don’t bear the downside risk. This means that in these careers, individuals never have skin in the game and don’t know what it’s like to take on the risk of a business owner.
There is a saying, “No opinion without risk; and no risk without hope for return”. Watch out for advice from people who have never put money where their mouth is.
When I first read Antifragile, I found Taleb’s ideas somewhat extreme. However, the more I interact with entrepreneurs today, the more I appreciate the importance of domain-specific experts in society. These individuals move the needle while others sit back and criticize. They immerse themselves in their own worlds, addressing real problems that have yet to be recognized, and dive straight in despite how unconventional it may seem.
When you're early in your career, it’s natural to feel insecure about your ideas—you don’t know much about the world yet. But that’s not an excuse to hold back. The only way to find your footing is to tinker. Tinkering lets you discover truths that no book or case study could teach, and those truths often become the foundation of the specific knowledge that sets you apart. Over time, this becomes the bedrock of a career that no one else can replicate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Keenan Ugarte is Managing Partner at DayOne Capital Ventures, an independent private holding company that invests in and builds high-growth, early-stage businesses that serve the underserved Philippine mass market. He is also the Co-Founder of The Independent Investor, a media platform spotlighting early-stage companies and innovation within the Philippine startup ecosystem.