<p>Chinese government has highlighted the importance of niche leaders in recent years, yet little is known about the factors that enable them to emerge in this distinctive context. To unpack the “specialization paradox” that may impede the inception and development of niche leaders, this paper proposes that the founder’s industry experience in previous entrepreneurial ventures is a key antecedent of niche leadership. Based on an experiential learning perspective, it examines content and structure of founder’s industry experience that propel a venture to a niche leader. Using a combined and manually coded database of 5,227 Technology-based Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in a developed province in East China, it tests and confirms the following hypotheses: (1) The founder’s accumulation of related industry experience is positively related to the likelihood of becoming a niche leader, compared to specific and heterogenous industry experience; (2) The proportion of founders’ related industry experience exhibits an inverted U-shaped correlation with the likelihood of becoming a niche leader. Our findings offer novel insights into the accumulation and portfolio of industry experience in the emerging process of niche leaders in Chinese context, thereby contributing to the literature on niche leader and founder industry experience.</p>