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Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is a bank today for the same reason everyone was a social network in the 00's.

A few startups started encroaching into financial services territory, took all the risk (including regulatory), and now that it's clear it's something worth pursuing Big Tech is following, expecting to leverage their existing products/services/ecosystem to lock you in by yet another aspect your life.

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As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.

- No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush (2014)

That’s an interesting perspective. Related to it, I often feel like entrepreneurs in tech don’t realise how much their innovation is restricted by capital markets.

OP’s startup is actually a great example of this. Medical debt is indeed a troubling problem in the USA, but OP’s solution is yet another financial product, something that can get funded. VCs can’t fund single-payer healthcare policy entrepreneurship even if that’s actually what would solve the medical debt problem.

That's a very good point! I agree!

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