I feel there is no excuse. Startups cut all sorts of corners but why? Get rich at other people's expense?
The tech founder should know their shit prior to building it so that time and runway and deadlines are no excuse. Really if you are doing fintech you should have employment experience and understand all the operations well.
Otherwise they are no better than say home builders who mismanage and go bankrupt. Or less geneously, they are conmen.
It does feel like a case of the Costco hotdog going up to $2 followed by "grrrr. Thats it! I'm..... going to keep buying it because it is still damn cheap!"
I remember reading something about the Costco hot dog story, quite funny IMO, here's what I just found from 2018:
"I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’ That’s all I really needed. By the way, if you raised (the price) to $1.75, it would not be that big of a deal. People would still buy (it). But it’s the mindset that when you think of Costco, you think of the $1.50 hot dog (and soda)." [1].
Turns out Costco has a new CEO this year, and again the hot dog topic came to light apparently, lol. This article is from 2024:
"'To clear up some recent media speculation, I also want to confirm the $1.50 hot dog price is safe,' Millerchip said." [2].
Think about. Imagine they sell 100 hot dogs per hour. A $0.25 difference means $25/hr in a store doing many orders of magnitude more revenue each hour.
It’s nothing. The way they play it up in the media gets a lot of attention and builds goodwill, but it’s entirely meaningless to their bottom line.
It’s amazing that people eat these stories up, though. I’ve heard so many people repeating this story as if it’s some amazing secret.
When the price does increase, you'll know that there's a new CEO who's lost all connection to reality (in the same way that always happens when you put a person in front of an abstraction without obvious leaks).
It's not a loss leader. They still make a profit on the combo because the ingredients are cheap and it takes almost no labor to prepare on a per-dog basis.
And 1.50 is cheap now but was relatively expensive when the combo launched in 1985 (for comparison, a Big Mac combo with fries and a drink was 2.59, a KFC combo was around $3).
Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.
If drugs flood my community, you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh". If you put the burden on the population when everything in society works against them, it's not productive in any way.
> you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh"
But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
But it's not an individual problem! Me not doing drugs doesn't prevent me from being impacted by people who do, and the same goes for people who consume poisoned information sources.
Sure, it is both. And in this type of situations I think the more important one to tackle is the systemic one, so that putting the burden on the individual is made manageable.
To give another analogy, if you want people to recycle, you need to create recycling stations in their area, and not force them to drive 50 kilometers to recycle a plastic bottle. That burden of infrastructure is on the government unfortunately in some part.
The individual solution is insufficient in this case. Once a problem like this becomes a strong signal at the level of population statistics, it means there's a systemic cause that's stronger than most people's willpower.
Society is flush with lots of drugs tobacco, alcohol, sugar, junk food, social media, reels... At society level, better laws and campaigns may work best but at individual level you'll get best ROI by focusing efforts on disciplining yourself and your family and friends.
You would have a better main point when you started to question how this accident could happen:
Oh oopsie, I am the owner of highly popular media, that by accident does everything to not talk about subjects that are highly damaging for society, but that, if they would, would be highly detrimental to my and my business partners interests. Also, by accident, instead of bringing real investigative journalism looking at the big picture, my media brings a firehose of addictive, emotionial pulp of no relevance.
The problem is: we are naturally attracted to junk that tickles are emotional belief systems, for example some ideas we have about immigrants. It takes active THINKING to go against your gut feeling.
How do you do that when you
1. were never taught to take that painful step of doubting your deepest held memes
2. were brainwashed by endless affirmation via infotainment
3. are living in an infotainment environment were half of your countrymen believe things like "the election was stolen"?
You are proposing to bank on someone already deeply burdened by debt.
I can't engage with this unless I talk politics... and my views (based on calling spades spades) wont be popular with anyone on any side ;). So will leave it there and say yes it is unfortunate.
r/leopardsatemyface sums it up though (although I don't blindly agree with all that is posted there)
And their public mongodb hacked into 6 months later causing the company to go bust 12 months later. 18 months later there is a Github project that impersonates the server as a workaround.
It also becomes easier. If you missed the early 2000s SOAP hype for example you ... just saved a load of time. Maybe stepping back you can avoid langchain etc. and various other workaround tooling and see what wins.
The tech founder should know their shit prior to building it so that time and runway and deadlines are no excuse. Really if you are doing fintech you should have employment experience and understand all the operations well.
Otherwise they are no better than say home builders who mismanage and go bankrupt. Or less geneously, they are conmen.