This might be why it is so depressing when someone with deep domain knowledge and insights in a product area (say, hardware, or security, or something else like that) decides based on a perception of the funding market to do something else entirely, like another local/social/mobile photo sharing site for cats.

I know of at least one awesome company with great engineering founders who were for some reason working on a consumer application for a while, before pivoting back to a harder engineering problem. They've been quite successful so far at the latter, which sort of justifies how sad I felt when they were doing the other thing.