The legal and regulatory obstacles to starting a business probably don't help but IMO the bigger issue is trying to break into markets that are dominated by massive global players who benefit from economies of scale and access to funding that newer companies don't have.

The other side of this is that consumers don't have the information required to properly differentiate between competitors. If I'm shopping for a new TV I have no idea where or how it is made which is why so many people default to brand names as very rough proxies for quality. That information asymmetry is exactly what websites like this are trying to combat, but it's clearly an uphill struggle.

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inigyou 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not only talking about legal and regulatory issues, indeed.

I think one of the big ones is rent. Suuuure you can just take some months to invent a product, but if you start with a $3000 loss per month, that's a high bar to clear.

Another one is lack of pressure. The person who invented the TV was surely thinking about how much money he would make or how much he would change society. But now there are so many TVs for under $500, what would I really add by making a new one that wouldn't have been optimized and battle-hardened and would be otherwise identical to all the others? (From the reverse side too, why would I buy a $1000 TV identical to a $500 one? Market for lemons. Fairphone's in this position.)

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pjc50 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> if you start with a $3000 loss per month

This is a question of access to capital. Since we're all on the VC site we should understand how that works; for things like that it's very important to get "angel" investors who are comfortable putting in less-than-six-figures to get a product to the stage where it is proven for bigger investors.

I'm glad that everyone's quoting Market for Lemons now, but it doesn't quite apply to Fairphone. Fairphone aren't trying to cheat you, there's no information asymmetry here; they're just providing a feature ("fairness") which you can't easily get elsewhere and that turns out to be really expensive.

At the other end of the "market entry" problem: this is why RAM is so expensive right now, you can't just spin up a new DRAM line in your garage even if you're Sam Zeeloof.

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inigyou 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Why would a capitalist fund something that will obviously not make money, like a random Finnish dude's operating system, when there's already Microsoft Windows?

	▲	pjc50 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Jorma Jaakko Ollila didn't seem to have that problem. (Explaining the joke: Finnish CEO of Nokia, responsible for the Symbian operating system)