Contrasting perspective: Founders like you describe are likely mythical. Don't exist. Not a single one in the world... at least if you mean founders of possib

Contrasting perspective: Founders like you describe are likely mythical. Don't exist. Not a single one in the world... at least if you mean founders of possibly competing firms. To be able to compete with the likes of google, you're going to need considerable scale - there's going to be a lot of up-front investment necessary to get there. And that means they need to "sell out" to outside investors to get anywhere. The kind of people that are really fundamentally opposed to any kind of takeover by any large tech firm probably won't pass this hurdle. The people that do pass that hurdle probably are more successful precisely because they're more pragmatic. And in any case they'll be giving away some amount of control in the process, and may need several rounds of funding... it's pretty far-fetched to assume any business that survives that kiln will really have the (self-harming!) principles to oppose a lucrative takeover and retain the control to too. It's always possible somebody will find some really overlooked niche, grow big there, and then expand from there... but it's a really, really long shot, and certainly unlikely enough that this is never going to add up to significantly increased competition in the sector. Even if by some surprising happenstance one or two new competitors emerge like that... that's still a very, very inefficient basis for a market. We need hundreds of competitors (or at the very least no barriers to entry for hundreds of potential competitors) - not just a handful - for a market economy to do its optimization magic. A few plucky founders just don't matter.