Evolved vs. Inherited Expertise
How bottom-up problem solvers create more value than top-down theorists
TL;DR: Career development is more effective when built from bottom-up problem expertise rather than chasing technological trends. Evolved experts who deeply understand specific pain points create lasting value and develop knowledge that compounds, while those focused solely on technology trends develop expertise that quickly becomes obsolete.
Most people approach career development backwards.
They're obsessed with trends, buzzwords, and keeping up with the latest innovations. They doom scroll X. They panic about missing the next breakthrough, knowing that every innovation has it’s window of opportunity.
They're looking up at the technology when they should be looking down at the problems.
This is backwards. Completely backwards.
While everyone's racing to become “experts," or “thought leaders,” the real opportunity is becoming an expert at problems solving.
The Expertise Gap
Here's where expertise thrives:
In implementation gaps across industries.
In compliance nightmares no one knows how to solve.
In human-computer workflow problems that need fixing.
In quality control needs that didn't exist before.
These problems are everywhere. They're concrete. They're urgent. They're valuable.
But most people miss them because they're too busy chasing the technology itself.
I was at a conference recently, surrounded by corporate development people and founders who wanted to pick my brain on AI.
Something struck me during these conversations.
There’s two distinct types of expertise:
Inherited Expertise: built top-down knowledge of industry and trends, with zero understanding of actual problems. They have no ability to separate fads from future foundations.
Evolved Expertise: built bottom-up expertise in real pain points, learned just enough to solve them, created something (product, service, workflow, etc.) actually needed.
The people with inherited expertise stood out from the rest. When they asked questions, they weren’t hunting for new facts. They weren’t looking for fix anything. They just want to hear the same answers they already believe.
They aren’t looking for ways to solve their own problems, and they don’t have any helpful answers for anyone else either.
Inherited experts chase ghost. Imagining friction points. Ignoring actual pain points staring them in the face.
Why?
Because they're looking at things from the top-down rather than being immersed in the trenches.
One expert knows the map. The other has walked the terrain.
Guess who creates more value? Guess who's irreplaceable?
Evolved Expertise Wins
The AI career gold rush has created a strange paradox.
Thousands of people building expertise from the top-down, studying the technology abstractly, desperately trying to predict where AI is going next so that they can get rich.
But bottom-up builders solve actual problems.
They don't outguess the future. They build expertise in the messy present, solving concrete problems with available tools.
This is like, in 2010, when Patrick and John Collison noticed that accepting payments online was a nightmare for developers.
The top-down experts were busy theorizing about the future of fintech, building complex financial products, or speculating about blockchain.
But the Collisons focused on a simple, urgent problem: developers just wanted to add payments to their apps without wrestling with banks, paperwork, and clunky APIs.
They didn't start by inventing new financial models.
They started by obsessing over the developer experience.
They built a dead-simple API, solved compliance headaches, and handled the ugly details.
Stripe's expertise was forged in the messy, unglamorous reality of implementation gaps, exactly what the evolved expert champions.
Expertise Moats
Here's the brutal truth:
Generic knowledge is rapidly becoming commoditized.
Courses and universities are churning out thousands of people with the same surface-level skills.
Meanwhile, bottom-up builders are quietly solving real problems in trenches, creating expertise moats no one can cross.
They have context. They have relationships. They understand nuance.
Their specific knowledge informs them on the problems actually matter.
Compound Knowledge
Technology changes. Platforms evolve. Tools improve.
But problems? Problems are persistent.
When you build expertise around solving problems, your skills compound.
When you build expertise around specific technologies, your knowledge decays.
The trend-followers are already struggling. They jumped from crypto to NFTs to AI, always one step behind, always searching for the next wave.
The bottom-up experts are thriving. They're building businesses. They're becoming indispensable. They're creating value that lasts.
Startups don't need more philosophers.
They need problem identifiers with evolved expertise.
Founders are desperate for domain experts who can who can guide application toward real pain points.
The evolved experts sees opportunities the trend-follower misses.
They see customer pain, not theoretical capabilities.
They see market gaps, not technology specs.
Building Your Expertise
Flip your entire approach.
Don't build expertise from the top-down.
Build it from the bottom-up.
Become the expert in a problem space that current technology touches but doesn't yet solve.
That’s how you’ll find the next company primed to hit their inflection point.
Learn just enough technical skills to be dangerous, but become world-class at understanding the problems.
This isn't about ignoring technology.
It's about approaching expertise from the ground up instead of the top-down.
It's about building knowledge that compounds rather than depreciates.
It's about solving problems that matter rather than chasing trends that fade.
The world doesn't need more career consultants.
It needs bottom-up builders who know how to use technology.
Which kind of expertise are you building?