I don't think it's hard per-se. I think it's hard if you have investors. I know plenty of founders who would be happy with lower constant profits, less employe

I don't think it's hard per-se. I think it's hard if you have investors. I know plenty of founders who would be happy with lower constant profits, less employees, in order to have a company which doesn't actively psychologically harm its users, a less stressful working environment. Gumroad is the perfect example of this. The problems come from VC money, which force a company to chase 500x returns or die trying. More in general, whenever there is centralisation of resources, problems ensue at some point later on. Regulations are not the answer - established companies find a way to arginate them (look at Google playing with cookies), smaller companies trying to go live and compete have a slower time to market and die, benefiting the established companies. On top of this regulations introduce a different set of problems. What if I'm okay being on a website which doesn't respect my privacy? What if I care more about reading a news article and never visit that website again more than I care about them respecting some rules regarding what kind of tracking they do? Instead of assuming we, the lawmakers, are omniscient and perfect, I think we should just get out of the way of the market and limit governmental influence to reduce the number of monopolies and corruption that gets into the real world - and then bubbles up in various ways, chasing infinte growth being one of them. To 100 more Gumroads.