I don't think SF's situation is indicative of civil society.
This is very specific to crime issues of the Bay. There are places in the world where I could leave my wallet at a restaurant, walk away to go to the bathroom and it would be waiting for me when I was back.
Shouldn't the insurance company care because if they can reduce their premiums, they can be more competitive for employers/purchasers? I don't understand why the insurance company isn't cost driven.
Well the valuation process is somewhat automated (they basically need to pull in transactional and user data from shopify into some financial model) which does require engineers.
They are probably focusing on shopify because they need to automatically ingest financial metrics for the valuation. Shopify has the transaction data so they can automatically value any company on the platform. They are probably starting with shopify since its the biggest ecommerce platfor.
Just going to add a positive anecdotal example since most of this thread is negative. I finished App Academy back in 2015 and 6 years later, most of my friends are a top tier software companies. In general our cohort did well, although there were definitely people who did not succeed. The experience was truly life changing for some of the folks.
I do agree that I've seen a LOT of bootcamps try to "scale" out their programs by removing human teachers and using video/written content or by increasing student to teacher ratios. I'm curious if the experience I had still holds today at any bootcamps or if the drive to "scale" has messed up the industry