Yesterday, I was listening to an old interview with Palmer Luckey where he shared a fascinating detail: in the early days of Anduril, the ratio of lawyers to engineers was actually skewed towards the legal team.

A pretty counter-intuitive piece of data for a company that produces highly technological hardware.

While yes, they deal in weapons, and that naturally inlfuences things, the takeaway is much broader. And simplification alone won’t get you there.

In highly regulated industries, technology alone doesn’t get very far without the right legal setup and the necessary proactive legal mindset.

This immediately made me think about the analogy to fintech.

In the financial sector, you simply can’t move forward without a solid legal foundation. One that actively seeks to evolve the status quo, rather than just policing it.

The issue is not just about having the ability to do or not do something, such as launching a new feature, a service, or anything else.

It’s fundamentally about “how” you are able to deliver it.

It is a matter of pure and simple User Experience.

A UX that is defined not just by the digital interface, but by the underlying layer that enables the interface itself.

It’s a matter of leveraging the regulation, rather simply being constrained by it.

With strong foundations, it becomes much easier to build something truly useful and beautiful.

And User Experience is (often) what determines whether a product not only manages to launch but, above all, manages to stay on the market.