There is, sometimes, a tendency on the part of young, ambitious entrepreneurs, to be overly optimistic and assume that they can gatecrash an industry they know nothing about, set up a slick website and disrupt the big, bloated, uncool incumbents.
Also, disrupting American health insurance is like "disrupting" terrorism. (It took 10 years to get one guy.) It's not something you can pull off in an afternoon. You're facing evil. Not irritating inefficiencies, but an adversary with a history of killing people to further its own ends.
Startup people think that the natives in whatever they want to "disrupt" are stupid. That they're facing accidental inefficiency instead of malignancy. In fact, the bad guys have just as many smart people as we do in tech. It's just that their smart people have been focused on building relationships, people-hacking, negotiation, litigation and loophole-finding, while we've been reading papers about category theory. Underestimating them is a bad call. Engineers turned founders make the same mistakes with "dumb" VCs and lose their shirts.
I think that it's generally a good assumption, anywhere in business (and most places in life), that whoever you're talking to is self-interested. Not evil, not even necessarily selfish, but it's a good bet that their world revolves around them.
And once you've got this principle ingrained in your mind, navigating the big scary world of business, or VC, or Google, or health insurance, or any other industry becomes much easier. Because you start to look for what people's incentives are, and don't ask them to do things that are against their own incentives. People are much more inclined to cooperate with you when it doesn't hurt their own interests.
People who actually "disrupt" industries, rather than just talk about it, do so by finding loopholes in other folks' incentive structures. They figure out other ways of doing things that incentivize everybody involved to cooperate with them, and that's how they revolutionize things.
The parent talked about fighting evil but the vast majority of people who work in industries like health aren'e evil - they're merely acting in their own self-interest within a system/industry that has evolved, over time, to exploit the vulnerable.
Also, disrupting American health insurance is like "disrupting" terrorism. (It took 10 years to get one guy.) It's not something you can pull off in an afternoon. You're facing evil. Not irritating inefficiencies, but an adversary with a history of killing people to further its own ends.
Startup people think that the natives in whatever they want to "disrupt" are stupid. That they're facing accidental inefficiency instead of malignancy. In fact, the bad guys have just as many smart people as we do in tech. It's just that their smart people have been focused on building relationships, people-hacking, negotiation, litigation and loophole-finding, while we've been reading papers about category theory. Underestimating them is a bad call. Engineers turned founders make the same mistakes with "dumb" VCs and lose their shirts.