Companies violate federal or state (or country, in my case) laws all the time. I've read about Y Combinator actually encouraging some of its startups to violat

Companies violate federal or state (or country, in my case) laws all the time. I've read about Y Combinator actually encouraging some of its startups to violate laws (in the "hack the system" sense, not in criminal violations sense). If you think about it, many of the top startups do: Uber, AirBnB (and others that are losing like Zenefits, FanDuel or DraftKings). See: https://blog.placeit.net/startups-ignored-law-won/ https://blog.placeit.net/startups-ignored-law-won/ It's, sadly, one of the only effective ways to get them to be discussed or modified, laws have a lot of inertia going for them. I'm definitely not happy about the ethics in the above case, though. Another thing I was going to add is that some CEOs knowingly violate the laws and incorporate that into their risk models (cost of fine + lawyers weighted by chance of it happening), it's usually a lot more cost effective to violate them (The CTO in the above example might have done such cost/benefit calculation).