More to the point, what better way to disrupt an industry than be familiar with that industry, and its flaws? Yeah, I agree that being an executive (i.e., the only 'skills' they have is making decisions in a specific environment, i.e., the status quo one) is probably detrimental...but Netflix wasn't originally in the same industry as Hollywood (they started in the soon to decline industry of video rental, and naturally progressed to streaming, and then original content creation). Amazon wasn't in the industry of publishing, they started in the industry of mail order books using this newfangled internet thing. Square isn't in the same industry as Visa; they're a user of Visa's services to build an easy to use payment portal for mobile (Visa even invested in them). Googling 'accepting credit cards' is -exactly what I'd expect- if you're trying to accept Visa, not if you're trying to displace them (because if the latter, who cares how Visa does it?). I think this says more about having -tangential- industry experience. All of them had enough insight into the problems in related industries, without having grown complacent with them, that they either were able to move into those industries (Netflix was able to move into content creation, Amazon was able to move into publishing), or were able to create business models addressing those industry's pain points (Square).