I agree. You can certainly do it without the "background", but we specifically had to get some well-connected "right-backgrounded" people involved before folks would answer our calls because all our principals had degrees from schools they never heard of (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) and experience in little niche defense contractors that aren't "cool" by SV standards.
(However, we did what we needed to do--get some Stanford people with ties to Sand Hill Road--and got it done.)
Marc Andreesen gave a talk where he frames it as one of the first hurdles in building a company. If you have a hard time finding some folks in the VC's network for initial contact, you'll probably have an even harder time reaching customers, advisors, engineers, etc.
(However, we did what we needed to do--get some Stanford people with ties to Sand Hill Road--and got it done.)