There’s a particular kind of LinkedIn post that runs the same routine almost every time. Someone does a good thing, posted about it, and the comments split instantly into the people who feel warm about it and the people who feel furious about everything it implies. Only few of the commenters, if any, ask the one question that would actually settle something: is this story about what it claims to be about?
Recently, a 16-year-old named Levi Jacobs sent Mollie founder Adriaan Mol a WhatsApp message. He reached out in frustration. He was, on paper, capable of exactly what he was trying to do: open a business bank account. He’d done the paperwork: Levi already held what’s called a ‘handlichting’ (a legal status granted by a Dutch kantonrechter, or cantonal court judge), that lets a minor of sixteen or seventeen run a business and manage its income. It’s a special exception, lifting an age block, and another bank couldn’t help him, apparently because of “some rules”.
Mollie, it turned out, had the same age block in its own onboarding. Adriaan Mol read the message, the block came down within days, and he posted about it: a kid couldn’t get a bank account because of his age (“ik was ook van die leeftijd toen ik begon met bouwen”) and now he could.
The comments split the way they typically do. Some were grateful on Levi Jacobs’ behalf. Some treated it as proof the whole banking system is broken. A handful mentioned the handlichting, pointing out that rules like this exist for reasons and that exceptions exist for cases exactly like this one. Such comments typically get the response reserved for anyone caught defending a rule in public: bureaucrat, defender of yesteryear’s red tape, the thing standing between a sixteen-year-old and his dream.
That kind of dialog, more than the post itself, is what caught my attention. It’s what I have been noticing more often lately. Mind you: this is not about Jacobs, or Mol (I don’t know the details, and I can’t comment on what I don’t know); it’s merely the one example that triggered the below observation.
The Wrong Kind of Evidence
A handlichting isn’t a workaround invented for Levi Jacobs. It’s an established status under Dutch civil law, granted by a judge, giving a minor specific adult capacities: running a business, managing its income, signing the contracts that come with both. It has to be published and registered, made part of the public record. It exists precisely so a case like Levi’s shouldn’t ask the WhatsApp attention from an established business leader to get resolved.
This means Mollie’s own age block wasn’t enforcing the rule everyone assumes it was enforcing. The actual rule, the one about which minors can run a business and bank accordingly, already had an answer for Levi, years before he asked. What Mollie’s system hadn’t done was including a way to recognise that answer. Adriaan Mol’s fix wasn’t bending a rule for a sympathetic case. It was patching a gap in his own onboarding, after a sympathetic case happened to reach him directly.
This isn’t just about banking. The same pattern plays out everywhere: Max Verstappen driving in F1 without a driver’s license at 17, the NIX18 underage drinking rules, the push to ban fatbikes, new vaping regulations, AI in music. In each case, a single sympathetic example is held up as proof that the regulation itself is the problem.
Mol’s post itself gives away how thin the distinction is. Calling it bizarre that centuries old banks still can’t handle a minor running a business reads like an indictment of the system. It’s, in a narrower and far less flattering sense, closer to an indictment of Mollie’s own platform, dressed in the language of getting on the barricades and fighting the dinosaurs.
But is this the evidence? One kid, one business leader, one WhatsApp message; it doesn’t tell you anything about whether the underlying rule is fair, or whether the exception process actually works for the thousands of teenagers who don’t happen to be in touch with someone who runs a fintech company. It tells you that an exceptional case got resolved quickly. That’s not nothing; I found it commendable. It just isn’t proof of anything about the system not working as it should without a fintech founder’s number saved in your phone.
Where Rebel Ends
When I was a kid, I spent years on producing and mixing house and hip-hop music; genres built on the premise that the right kind of rule-breaking moves things forward. Sampling vs. copyrights, underground parties vs. permits. I understand the impulse behind Mol’s post on a level that has nothing to do with banking. Disruption, breaking an inherited rule because the people who made it weren’t thinking about you, is one of the oldest stories we tell ourselves, and it’s one of the best. On its own, though, it’s not enough information to know whether what’s happening is a lived reality.
There’s a useful line buried in the comments themselves: someone pointed out, half-joking, that social media, vaping and fatbikes are all apparently fine, while a bank account for a minor is somehow complicated. It’s meant as a gotcha, but it lands closer to the real pattern than the post does.
Similar posts about different topics get the same argument in public: an individual case, a careful rider, a responsible teenager, an ethical producer. They get held up as proof that regulation itself is the problem. And we’d hear, in Dutch, someone saying: “Ja, maar dat moet toch ook gewoon kunnen…?”. Meaning: we should be allowed to break the rules when we, “clearly”, know these rules weren’t meant for us, “every single time”, right?
I don’t think I’m exempt from any of this. I’ve felt the same warm pull toward the underdog, the same flash of irritation at whoever points out the inconvenient reason why a rule exists. Recognising the pattern in someone else’s comment section doesn’t put me outside of it. In fact, my initial empathetic reaction to the post shifted only when I gave it a second thought after also reading the comments.
The regulation was never built on individual cases. It was built on data about what happens at scale: average riders, average teenage brains, average outcomes, none of which a single sympathetic exception can speak to either way. It’s the guardrails where accidents happened before they got installed.
What separates a rebel from something more corrosive isn’t how hard the rule gets pushed. It’s whether the person pushing it still believes the rule has a reason to exist for everyone else. Levi Jacobs got an exception inside a system that still checks every other sixteen-year-old who applies. That’s a kind of rebellion the system can survive: the gate opens every once in a while but it remains a gate. The version that doesn’t survive shows up further down every one of these comment threads; not “make the exception easier to reach” but “get rid of the rule“. That isn’t rebellion anymore; that’s a call to remove the thing that lets anyone be checked at all, ever.
So why did Adriaan Mol post it? Maybe it really was nothing more complicated than a person who could help, did so, and felt good enough about it to say it out loud. That’s plausible. There’s no way to verify it from the outside, and I’m not sure it would change much if we could.
What’s harder to dismiss is what the post did once it left his hands; it told a story about a caring disruptor and an uncaring system, when the more accurate story was a software gap closed as a result of a WhatsApp exchange.
Similar posts get similar warm reactions and furious ones alike, and almost none of the kind that would have asked which story was actually true. Somewhere in that gap between what happened and what got celebrated, a few readers moved a little further toward wanting the checks gone entirely: the same drift that shows up under every story where the exception is turned into an accusation.
Mol didn’t do anything wrong. But we can ask ourselves whether the story he told, accurate in its details and misleading in its shape, did some of that work anyway.
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