> "startup" isn't a synonym for "I am above the law!"
It kinda is. Hear me out.
Commerce is bound to be political. Offering up a product or service for sale isn't always going to be acceptable to everyone. So we pass laws to tell people what they can and can't do. So far, so good.
Except that if this continues, the business landscape changes due to the collective weight of all these laws. Existing organizations that understand the growing burden of the necessary law that has to be complied with are eventually the only entities that can do business.
There needs to be some mechanism to operate in the opposite direction, to deprecate laws and allow smaller companies, who don't have the operational capacity to obey every single law that's ever been passed, to do business.
Law is an imperfect instrument, it remains imperfect no matter how much social good it does, it never foresees all the different ways that society can evolve. The startup, the small, scrappy player that seeks out market opportunities and creates businesses out of them, has to be willing to break laws, has to be willing to believe in itself and its ability to help society evolve.
Small economic actors have always played this role in society, there's nothing magic about Silicon Valley-style startups in this regard.
They do. Law enforcement resources are hopelessly and perpetually under-allocated. One can fly under the radar for a long, long time, so long as they don't start openly and flagrantly beg the "long" arm of the law to pay attention to them.
If you're both an under-privileged minority and you live in a heavily-policed area, this may not apply to you. But everyone else can operate based on a pragmatic assessment of the likelihood of getting caught.
Start a business that violates the law, so long as it's not one that invites the cops to bust through your doors, (i.e. drugs) your ability to operate will rest on society's judgment.
"Should be allowed" is language that hinges on a belief that the law is an inviolate arbiter of right and wrong. It is not. Crowd-sourced judgment is that arbiter. The law is just that arbiter's proxy.
That's not the right question to ask. The right question is whether we think Uber is innovative enough to change the laws for.
You've got your thinking backwards. It's not us that has to conform to the law, it's the law that has to conform to us. The right thing to do, IMO, is to make Uber conform to disability law, and do away with the other laws that seem to be doing nothing at this point besides protecting rents, like the taxi medallion system.
There are also other questions like whether we should consider Uber drivers to be employees or contractors. Any decently innovative startup will raise lots of these questions. Uber does just that.
Of course, it would require too much political capital to just do away with the taxi medallion system at this point. So we have to tolerate the grey state of affairs until the legal and political issues are wrangled.
Uber deserves to be rightly rich for being pioneers in this space.
> Uber deserves to be rightly rich for being pioneers in this space.
I have never been more disgusted by an answer on Hacker News. My apologies for that.
Uber's "wealth" is merely an artifact of VC money rushing into a space with an unjustifiable valuation predicated on the violation of transportation and disability laws.
Uber will be the Web Van of the mobility space. Cool idea, replaced by self-driving vehicles owned and operated by organizations willing to follow laws of the jurisdictions they operate in.
> predicated on the violation of transportation and disability laws.
You forgot labor laws.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I've attempted to lay out a rationale from as close to first principles as I can reasonably approach for the right relationship startups should have with the law and society and you've ignored it out of disgust.
No alternatives given for fixing the problems that legislation engenders for commerce, just irrational hatred.
It kinda is. Hear me out.
Commerce is bound to be political. Offering up a product or service for sale isn't always going to be acceptable to everyone. So we pass laws to tell people what they can and can't do. So far, so good.
Except that if this continues, the business landscape changes due to the collective weight of all these laws. Existing organizations that understand the growing burden of the necessary law that has to be complied with are eventually the only entities that can do business.
There needs to be some mechanism to operate in the opposite direction, to deprecate laws and allow smaller companies, who don't have the operational capacity to obey every single law that's ever been passed, to do business.
Law is an imperfect instrument, it remains imperfect no matter how much social good it does, it never foresees all the different ways that society can evolve. The startup, the small, scrappy player that seeks out market opportunities and creates businesses out of them, has to be willing to break laws, has to be willing to believe in itself and its ability to help society evolve.
Small economic actors have always played this role in society, there's nothing magic about Silicon Valley-style startups in this regard.