You must be new to the tech industry. :-)

1. Solve the easy 80% of the problem.

2. Deploy that "solution" - which would not be considered acceptable in just about any other industry - as widely as possible. Do not offer proper customer support.

3. Take the money you save on not solving the hard parts and not having customer support, and funnel it into marketing, to stimulate growth.

4. Continue until you fail, get acquired, or dominate the market.

5. If anyone asks what kind of outfit you're running, make a sad puppy face and say "scaling is hard!".

The issue is that the current players are unable to solve that part properly.

In my country, it was impossible to book a cab with an app before uber came.

Yesterday, I tried knowing if my insurance covered some dental cost, and I was unable to sign up or login on the website, I had to call a human to book an appointment to a brick and mortar store. This is the biggest insurance provider in a western european country. I'll take the new "startup" as soon as it comes, just because they make 80% of what I need convenient enough. They can deal with the remaining 20% later, currently my 80% needs are not served.

This is what happened when Craiglist and later Facebook cannibalized classified ads in the US; many local and hyperlocal newspapers disappeared because they were not big enough to attract major advertisers, but all the local ones left. Yet Craiglist provides no news at all and Facebook aggregates news but certainly doesn't produce any, and especially not at the local or hyperlocal level.

> Cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals, say researchers who tracked the decline of local news outlets between 1996 and 2015.

> Disruptions in local news coverage are soon followed by higher long-term borrowing costs for cities. Costs for bonds can rise as much as 11 basis points after the closure of a local newspaper—a finding that can’t be attributed to other underlying economic conditions, the authors say. Those civic watchdogs make a difference to the bottom line.

> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-30/when-loca...

That seems like a pretty big downside.

It's so depressing. It's probably better to not know how this stuff works.

and the business->government pipeline when Eisenhower's advisors all used to work/currently work for The United Fruit Company

If we're considering corporations to be "undemocratic, authoritarian, central-planning (...) communist dictatorships" inside, then so are all democratic governments. The "voice of the people" part of a democratic government is just a surface layer, the tip of an iceberg. Or, more charitably, a rudder of a ship - the part that sets the course, but is nevertheless insignificant in mass compared to the rest of the ship.

The bulk of every government is a top-down hierarchical structure, because it can't really be any other way. You can't hold votes on whether a particular clerk is supposed to be in a particular building on Monday 09:00, and whether they're supposed to approve the form you're trying to submit.

In a representative democracy you get a voice on who executes the orders regardless of whether you are rich or poor or smart or stupid or went to business school with who-knows-who.

If we were in Plato's perfect Republic where all the uninitiated adults were purged from the polis and there were only citizens trained since childhood to seriously consider matters of state, now we'd be in the same sport, if not ballpark.

How would you feel if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission soft-balled Mr. Burns, then one of its commissioners jumped ship to work at Springfield Nuclear?

Even if that commissioner was an enlightened patrician of high moral character, it would create the appearance of corruption. And that alone is corrosive to the rule of law.

People with less integrity, people downstream in industry, might interpret that as a signal that regulators are a joke. They may go on television and say things like "I don't respect the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."

The bigger problem is the reverse; we should really have the government do something like finance's "garden leave", where leaving employees are paid while banned from industry employment, so that whatever competitive info you had is outdated by the time you can take a job in industry again.

If I'm from New Hampshire, Ohio, Maine, South Dakota or somewhere else government is still kinda sorta accountable I'm Outraged(TM).

If I'm from Massachusetts, Louisiana, California, New York, or somewhere else government has been unaccountable for generations I shrug and move on with life.

To be fair, its possible that the poster was merely meaning that the template is “Hire the available ex-regulators of the party currently in power”, but was communicating that by applying the template to the current situation, where we are in the first year of an Administration, so the available supply of regulators meeting that description will generally be from the last Administration of the same party.

When Jamie Dimon discussed the warm relationship between Obama officials and tech in a public speech at Stanford, I assumed it was (1) common knowledge and (2) socially acceptable to discuss in public.

I think the current administration has made excellent personnel choices in the regulatory agencies. I am hopeful for the future.

But I don't think I "called out" anyone. I understand that expression to mean "seeking to direct reflexive mob anger toward a specific individual". It's the practice that's troubling, not the people.

I actually believe that most of the people engaged in this practice (revolving door) have impeccable moral character.

Unfortunately many people call out Obama specifically as a way to take a partisan political jab at the left especially on forums. Trump’s White House was full of crooks who really were there based 100% on who they knew since many were otherwise unqualified. It makes going back a president feel like cherry picking an example but I see you could have done it as Biden would draw from Obama’s sphere more.

I am not aware of the specific Dimon speech you mentioned. Ajit Pai had a close relationship with the ISPs and Telecommunications companies with all their attacks on net neutrality etc. so I do find that the argument that Democrats are so much cozier with tech to be a bit oversimplified.

I agree with your comment overall, just shedding some insights on my thinking

The primary issue is that these 5 steps work.

The VC market is basically medieval patronage with a capitalistic flair. Now the patrons are expected to bring you in massive returns instead of just producing culture.

Democratizing X also means commoditizing X by offering a minimum acceptable solution that will become what people are taught to expect. I am not sure there is a way around this to be honest.

Robinhood has gotten their position by invisibly and dramatically increasing the amount of risk assumed by their customers' life savings. Everybody's a savvy investor in a record-breaking bull market.

Yeah, well, I regularly read on HN about how retail consumers are locked out of investing in stocks, that only rich people can.

Robinhood blew that argument out of the water.

I've been a retail consumer stock investor my entire adult life, and would be pretty unhappy if regulations locked me out of that.

Vanguard and Schwab already did that decades ago. They just didn't gamify their products or benefit from meme culture.

> I've been a retail consumer stock investor my entire adult life, and would be pretty unhappy if regulations locked me out of that.

"Retail consumers should not be [trading individual stocks]" is not a claim that individuals should be barred from putting their life savings into belly button lint futures if that's what want to do. It's simply stating that by and large, individuals should be encouraged towards sensible defaults and not simply whatever the latest meme investment is. Veering from those defaults for non-trivial sums of money should involve increasing levels of warning and resistance proportionate to the estimated change in risk.

And that goes in both directions. Just as retail consumers should be given additional levels of resistance for investing in individual stocks, investing in recently-memed stocks, buying put options, and buying on margin, they should also meet resistance when putting their entire balance into cash positions as happens to far too many investors that don't realize the error.

I know that. I didn't say the HN comments were correct! Heck, even in the 1920's there's that famous story of the elevator boy talking about the stocks he was trading.

Let adults be adults and invest the way they want to. The government shouldn't be treating them like children.

    $ cat stouset.comments | grep -i "government"
    $

One of these can be done in ten minutes from your couch while stoned with a handful of clicks. I’ll leave you to guess which of the two it is, but suffice it to say that’s the one I think should have some additional guard rails.

The movement to limit the most profitable investments only to “experienced” i.e. already wealthy investors is one thing that prevents average people from accumulating wealth.

If an average person is allowed to walk into Vegas and put their whole life savings on black, or spend it on lottery tickets why shouldn’t they be able to buy a stock? Less nanny state, please not more.

This is ridiculous. High-quality, virtually zero-cost index funds that track the market (or various subsectors of the market) are available to essentially every American and have been for decades. These investments have produced returns well in excess of the average performance of the overwhelming majority of investment professionals.

Further, their risk-adjusted returns have been second to none. Throwing novice investors into the deep end of the pool with the consolation that some small fraction of them will beat the market and some minute fraction will win the lottery doesn't help "average people" accumulate wealth. Every available metric we've tracked has repeatedly shown that "average people" have the best performance from low-cost index funds with a long-term buy-and-hold strategy. Every other strategy has demonstrably worse performance on average.

> If an average person is allowed to walk into Vegas and put their whole life savings on black, or spend it on lottery tickets why shouldn’t they be able to buy a stock? Less nanny state, please not more.

It is wild to me that every single person detracting from my comments seems to believe that "retail investors should not be investing in individual stocks" is some sort of call to have the government step in and prohibit individuals from investing in $TSLA.

Nobody is asking for that.

We're saying that Robinhood is playing an extremely dangerous game with their clients' well-being by promoting risky and irresponsible decision-making around their livelihoods. This has been a successful strategy for them so far, but it has relied entirely on the unprecedented bull market we've found ourselves in. I'd bet large sums of money that their internal metrics show their customers perform significantly worse on average than the market overall, and I'll double that bet that their customers will fare amongst the worst when the next correction hits.

> We're saying that Robinhood is playing an extremely dangerous game with their clients' well-being by promoting risky and irresponsible decision-making around their livelihoods.

How does Robinhood promote risky and irresponsible decision making? Robinhood doesn't force anyone to buy stocks. Retail investors have been able to buy stocks since the stock market existed. Robinhood's innovation is to let them do it for $0 commissions, which dramatically decreases risk for small investors.

For example, Vanguard charges a $7 commission per trade unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested with them. If you want to invest $100, you will pay $14 in commissions - $7 when you buy and $7 when you sell. Now your investment needs to return at least 14% just to break even.

Compare to $0 commissions on Robinhood, now, if the underlying investment makes money at all, you make money. This is a huge benefit for people who only have small amounts to invest.

The $7 commission doesn't matter much if you're investing tens of thousands of dollars, it matters a lot if you're investing much less.

I'm not proposing anything. I didn't say anything to even suggest I'm proposing something.

All I said is that retail investors, by and large, shouldn't be trading in individual stocks. And they shouldn't! It's a demonstrably less-successful investment strategy on average than index investing. Especially for completely novice investors.

"Nobody should be feeding chocolate to their dog. " "No parent should use an iPad as a substitute for actually raising their child." "Nobody should buy a home warranty, they almost never end up paying out." Which of these statements do you think are even remotely close to advocating for government intervention?

> How does Robinhood promote risky and irresponsible decision making? Robinhood doesn't force anyone to buy stocks.

In what universe are "promoting" and "forcing" equivalent verbs?

Why can't it simply be true that encouraging financially illiterate people to day trade is just an unfathomably irresponsible idea? All of the available evidence supports this assertion. Sure, some people will do better than others; that's the nature of statistical distributions. But on the whole, day traders do measurably worse than buy-and-hold index investors.

That's not a claim that all of Robinhood's customers are financially illiterate. Nor is it a value judgment against those who are. It's simply a statement that Robinhood explicitly markets their services towards people with little to no financial background, and everything about their in-app experience is designed to encourage a style of trading that is drastically more likely to leave those customers less well off than more boring approaches. And—very potentially—less well off than just leaving their money under the mattress. Countless retail investors lost absolutely everything by selling during the recession. Do you expect Robinhood's customers to do better on average or worse than average in the next one?

> Robinhood's innovation is to let them do it for $0 commissions

Robinhood's "innovation" is gamifying the whole thing and taking advantage of meme culture. If they'd managed to do that for boring-as-shit index funds, that would have been an achievement of absolutely immeasurable value. Instead all they've done is found a way to bring fresh, unsuspecting bait to the sharks' feeding grounds.

> For example, Vanguard charges a $7 commission per trade unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested with them. If you want to invest $100, you will pay $14 in commissions - $7 when you buy and $7 when you sell. Now your investment needs to return at least 14% just to break even.

No retail investor should be purchasing individual stocks.

Vanguard has $0 fees for index funds, which is where the overwhelming majority of retail investors should be putting their savings. And at those numbers, the transparent costs of expense ratios are essentially nonexistent.

Starting a company is not for everyone. It's a calling.

Being able to invest and get competitive returns should be democratized. It is a known fact that the richest have historically been able to invest their money and get high returns while the rest of us had to settle for savings accounts (0.5% return currently). And the trend is accelerating[0], inequality is growing. This is not sustainable and should be addressed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Neither did nor would I.

> Being able to invest and get competitive returns should be democratized. It is a known fact that the richest have historically been able to invest their money and get high returns while the rest of us had to settle for savings accounts (0.5% return currently).

It is already democratized, and your last statement isn't even remotely true. Low-cost, whole-market index funds have been available to Joe Public for nearly fifty years now, and in those intervening years have represented essentially the optimum in terms of risk-adjusted returns.

Robinhood has not democratized investing, they've democratized day trading. It's like praising Harrah's for removing the rake (the casino's cut) from their poker games and promoting Hold Em to complete novices. Sure, some of their new customers will make it rich. And there are plenty of highly skilled poker players who've made a career out of it. But that's not the norm; the net result is just bringing more chum for the sharks to feed on.

As I said elsewhere, if Robinhood had figured out a way to get people to buy and hold boring-as-shit index funds through gamification and meme culture, it would be an achievement of immeasurable benefit. Unfortunately that's not what they've done. They've rebranded day trading as investing and brought a heaping mass of fresh, unsuspecting victims to be exploited by financial professionals with entire teams of researchers backing their plays.

The only reason the whole thing hasn't completely disintegrated is because of an unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime bull run where it's been virtually impossible not to make money. There's no way this works out in their customers' favor in the long run.

I've seen a bunch of (usually smaller or just starting) tech companies win out business because of how responsive their customer support even though their product was inferior.

Robinhood won because it saw an opening in changes in market demands:

- Increasingly lax SEC rules for retail traders.

- Increases in income inequality whereby the poor side of the spectrum has been told they can't have access to the rich's set of investment tools (i.e. millennials with varying degrees)

- Per transaction fees that made day trading appear less lucrative (see point before)

- Competitors with terrible UIs for non professional traders

Part of the reason the ETrade/Schwabs/TD's of the world didn't do what RH did was because it meant deliberately making creating a trading account more difficult. For example - Vanguard almost deliberately makes their service hard to day trader because they don't want to carry that risk profile.

So, this was not a market that was crying for better customer service but one that wanted cheap, easy to use access to investments that were seemingly unattainable previously.

I'm actually more surprised the SEC (or a class action lawsuit) didn't thwart RH turning into a large business when it was much smaller...not the competition.

You can't compare a service like Robinhood (or Coinbase, the like) with a product like Google or Facebook:

1. Unlike these free services, at an exchange, you really are a customer. The business model is that you pay fees for transactions. That's not the same as a free "take it or leave it" situation. As a paying customer, it is far more reasonable and expected to get support.

2. The nature of the support queries are far more serious. This isn't about your Instagram app glitching, this is about money. People unable to access it, transactions not coming through, withdrawal errors, fiat/banking errors. All very serious matters where not only you expect support, you expect urgent support and typically human support.

Now combine the above issues (true support needed, and much of it human support), we add the third and fatal ingredient: user growth. These services grow by at least a few million users per month.

I don't know how many require support, but even a small percentage means you're on a constant hiring spree.

Google and Facebook scale up by just not giving any support. How do you scale up this fast giving real support, so not just an FAQ or chat bot?

Robinhood is an awful company that’s a net negative on the world. Their biggest innovation is creating a Candy Crush UI for complex derivatives trading and making it accessible to people who failed high school math. Their CEO has been consistently dishonest and fraudulent.

If you want a solid mobile trading app for stocks and options Thinkorswim is light years superior in every dimension but looking like a Vegas slot machine.

This is the standard people have become trained to expect. Google does the same thing. The idea is basically that a certain level of scale, you can completely ignore customer support. There's always new users signing up, and placating any single one is no longer worth your time.

Anyone who does serious trading knows the value of actual 24/7 human customer support, and uses a platform like Schwab or Fidelity. But Robinhood is arbitraging the naivety of the millions of people who've never invested.

Schwab and Fidelity can deliver a good product with good customer service because users pay money for the product and are actually customers.

They were one of the early companies that learned that treating your customer right is a better long-term business than screwing them at every opportunity. Wasn't so common in the 80s and 90s.

If you read through the marketing material, you will notice that they use the word people and not individuals or persons or you. "People are at the center of everything we build."

For what is worth, Fidelity customer service is quick and reliable. They've always answered by questions or solved my issues over the phone.

I don't care for how they handle security though. I really wish they supported WebAuthn or at least TOTP that didn't require Symantec's proprietary TOPT solution. I wish they supported PGP for messages as well (I know those GMail users are having their financial data read by Google). When I asked about what "SchwabSecure" really is and what sort of encryption they use gave me marketing fluff, even stating "The reason you may not find more detailed information available online which supports this is so that we can prevent criminals from obtaining this information, and using that to get a foothold"--as opposed to my recent evaluation of email providers to see the competition who could provide the MOST transparency about how they set up their security.

1. install pre-reqs: sudo pip install python-vipaccess && brew install qrencode

2. Run: vipaccess provision -p -t VSMT

This will print out all the information needed. Note the Symantec ID (it looks like VSMT12345678). It is what goes in the "Credential ID" field when adding a new device on Schwab's website.

3. Save the otpauth://... data into data.txt.

4. (Optional) Modify the issue=Symantec parameter to read issue= Charles%20Schwab Also change VIP%20Access:VSMT123456789 to your Schwab online banking username. These are purely aesthetic changes and will only make a difference in the label that shows up in the Google Auth app.

5. Run: qrencode -o qr.png -s 15 < data.txt to generate the QR image (qr.png) from your otpauth data file.

6. Scan qr.png with your TOTP app.

7. Go to Schwab -> Service -> Security Center -> Manage Two-Step Verification -> Add another Security Token and input the Symantec ID from step 3 (it looks like VSMT12345678) and the current rolling TOTP code from your TOTP.

If you are concerned about security, you can just leave a couple of hundred bucks in there for whenever you need cash and push funds to it from your main bank to top it up.

Does anyone support PGP for messages?

Encrypting your "here's your trade confirmation for ACME" and "you were late on your credit card payment" from your email provider would be good.

Wow! Seriously? How do you feel the same way about the people you work with, if they aren't native speakers?

Personally, I think the much bigger problem is the shitty outsourcing. But semi-sensical corporatese excuse-making is definitely not improved by language and accent barriers.

On the otherhand my (massive) bank sure as heck better have the money to afford good native support. And for my beefs with Schwab, this they do a very good job at.

In the sense that they'll collapse and you'll lose your portfolio, or that they'll be down at a critical time you want to make a trade? For a buy and hold type of investor, the latter isn't really a concern.

For funsies, the open SIPC cases: https://www.sipc.org/cases-and-claims/open-cases/

I agree 1000% with this. I "recently" switched from RH to ally since I already have a decent chunk of cash there, and I am STILL waiting on my cost-basis to transfer. It has been over 75 days since they transferred my stock and cash, and every time I reach out to customer service they feed me the same canned response that due to volume of transfers it is taking longer than expected and they have no ETA on when my cost-basis will transfer.

So I just had to wait. Of course this sucks because it blocks you from selling, but it will eventually show up.

Because the interface is much easier to use. Particularly for options, which are dangerously easy to trade with Robinhood compared to their competitors like Think or Swim.

I also like the instant deposits that scale with account size.

RH’s trading hours for securities is more limited than anyone else, but I don’t find myself trading outside of those hours anyways.

I also don’t like their naive tax accounting and don’t expect them to handle wash sales properly, which are two very big negatives, but I haven’t found a better broker for my main use case.

Though they did have hiccups in trading peak GME/AMC.

It's refreshing being able to chat, or call a native english speaking call center where they will bend over backwards to help, waive fees, etc. No offense meant to ESL speakers, but I think we've all experienced 'support' that is hard to understand and communicate. I can't even get TCF on the phone.

Back in the Web 1.0 boom, seemingly dozens of online brokerages (ETrade, Ameritrade, Scottrade, etc) sprang up overnight to fuel easy consumer access to the "meme stocks" of the day (Pets.com, Yahoo, etc).

Those are the new legacy players and I guess Robinhood is the new generation.

I strongly suspect that the SaaS/consumer trend of having fewer human interactions will continue. The necessary caveat of this is that many firms will have less developed procedures for managing interesting situations.