> 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.

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?