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Comment by leaflets2 | Hacker News Reader

Unless all companies do things in such ways, equally inefficient

(I mean, if powerful execs get lots of money everywhere? almost)

That is not the end game because small companies, startups, etc. are more efficient than big ones and have no ingrained culture that prevents innovation.

Eventually some of those small companies become inefficient big companies. We see this struggle recently in the news, with the CEOs of Facebook and Google talking about how they need to become more efficient, maybe certain people shouldn't be there, etc. -- they got big when times were good and now they struggle with the inevitable consequences of bigness.

This has happened many times. Nobody saw Microsoft coming in the 1970s to dethrone IBM. Microsoft didn't see Google coming and still can't beat them on search, they didn't see AWS coming and is catching up on cloud years later, etc. Most of the automotive industry thought Tesla could not scale and would go out of business years ago.

That happens sometimes. Many times, the variance in launching a small company is so high that the risk premium and payoff for challenging the inefficiencies has a negative expected value.

Yet there is no shortage of people starting new companies and the trend over time has been toward more of that, not less.

I would dispute that claim. Business and organizations have never been larger, more powerful, more wealthy, or more politically connected. Small business has been shrinking drastically for generations now all across the globe. Especially outside of tech. But even in the tech world how many of the workers are operating primarily under the direct employment or contract of some 50,000+ employee company along with thousands of other contractors? And how many 20 person tech businesses have been operating consistently for 15 years?

> Small business has been shrinking drastically for generations now all across the globe. Especially outside of tech.

I am not saying it is not true but it would be good to have some data about this. Cafes, bakeries, small restaurants, lawyer offices, flower shops are all small businesses, a lot of them run by 1 or 2 people.

I guess it depends what we consider a small business.

> Unless all companies do things in such ways, equally inefficient

Keep in mind that there also exists competition from companies from other countries, such as China.

Not really. If a company from a fundamentally different economic framework were to become dominant in core industries it would be banned.

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