The company has found ways to avoid some of the regulations that banks are held to
If you look at all the unicorns of the past few decades, a surprisingly large number of them did it with software that wasn’t in any way technologically advanced, but exploited technology to find loopholes in the kind of industry regulations that were there to stop companies from screwing people over.
PayPal was a way to do banking without registering as a bank. Uber, Doordash and other gig economy apps are exercises in sidestepping employment law. Airbnb, despite its origins as a couchsurfing app, didn’t get huge until professional “hosts” started using it as a way to run apartment hotels without having to meet the expectations or obligations of one.
If you want to build a tech unicorn, all you need to ask yourself is, “how can I make something 5% more convenient and 200% more shit?”.
If you look at all the unicorns of the past few decades, a surprisingly large number of them did it with software that wasn’t in any way technologically advanced, but exploited technology to find loopholes in the kind of industry regulations that were there to stop companies from screwing people over.
PayPal was a way to do banking without registering as a bank. Uber, Doordash and other gig economy apps are exercises in sidestepping employment law. Airbnb, despite its origins as a couchsurfing app, didn’t get huge until professional “hosts” started using it as a way to run apartment hotels without having to meet the expectations or obligations of one.
If you want to build a tech unicorn, all you need to ask yourself is, “how can I make something 5% more convenient and 200% more shit?”.