> "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.