I guess that might depend on the kind of circles one operates in. E.g. if one is in SF, one might get the impression that there's no cut-throat competition, onl

I guess that might depend on the kind of circles one operates in. E.g. if one is in SF, one might get the impression that there's no cut-throat competition, only innovation. But the vast majority of companies aren't of that disruptive kind. They're just normal mom and pop shops, and FBA/Shopify businesses. Pretty much all those monopolies support small business. Think of Google, Facebook, YouTube, Etsy, Yelp, etc. Also, I'd push back on the implication that cut-throat competition leads to innovation. I think that's rarely the case. It absolutely leads to incremental innovation but rarely to disruptive innovation. That is almost always a function of an outsider, who's willing to challenge existing assumptions. (More often than not out of sheer ignorance of the existence of those assumptions. I can't even count the number of founders who've told me something along the lines of 'We didn't know we weren't supposed to do it this way.' Or, 'Had we known it would've been so hard, we'd have never even started.'