Stripe went into the payment gateway business, competing with perhaps 100 pretty small players for the side the big players don't want.

Make a consumer product banks can copy and try to prove its viable and I think you'll get that feedback.

Stripe, N26, SBV, Square, Brex, Monza... and many others all compete directly with banks.

That’s also very tangential to the fact that while some areas of banking, finance or weapons dealing may be dominated by large institutions, there’s plenty of other areas that are not. Stripe is a perfect example in how they started out by capturing a retail market that was outside the core business of the large players. Nobody would look at their value prop and say “finance is overfunded”, because that ignores what area they were actually trying to compete in.

If you wanted to make a startup that looked to innovate retail weapons trade, then no investor is going to tell you “you’ll never compete with Raytheon”, because no matter how big they are, they don’t compete in retail weapons trade. What they would more likely tell you is something like “we don’t invest in that vice industry”.

I think that's only true when the start up costs are relatively low, right? The airline industry also has a small number of very large players, but I don't know if we should also consider it ripe for disruption

The airline industry has already been massively disrupted by innovative startups and new investment. Startups have drastically changed the business of selling flights and travel services to consumers, the rise of budget airlines has completely changed the competitive landscape of that industry, and there’s countless ways that outside innovations have found their way into the supply chains of the big players.