Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
The problem is capitalism, and it's beyond the reach of education or regulation. There are other methods that could overturn it, of course, but not those two things.
Even if you established another economic system, though, that system too would be subject to corruption. I don't know how a society regulates itself in such a way that economic systems never get corrupted by the desire for short-term personal gain.
To expand on that, even if you didn't want to take the VC funded money and bootstrap your own business, the deck is stacked against you. If you compete in the same space, a VC funded company can do more marketing, develop the product faster, have more connections to important business partners because of large amount of money and connections they have.
And they will "outcompete" you at a loss, until the bootstrapped business goes under or settles for a tiny market share in a niche. So when they say, the economy is rigged, this is what they mean. You will need large amounts of capital to compete in the tech space. Even if you are two times smarter and work two times harder, you will never be able to compete with a VC funded company flushed with money in the same space unless you get reaaaally lucky.
Makes me wonder if a stronger system of government subsidies could replace the need for VC for some startups. The government agrees to back your expenses for X number of years until you have the means to pay back the investment, and if the startup flops in the end, the government takes the IP. If the startup is still deemed to have potential, the government continues operating the company as a state-sponsored org or folds it into a state agency to ensure the livelihoods of the startup's employees.
End result is that startups aren't forced into situations by VCs where they have to go public, and if they end up going under anyways by failing to pay back the government's investment (tax payer money, basically) it is seen as a purchase of potentially valuable IP which can be made available to the public for the betterment of society and industry.