Regardless of how true that is or isn't, a business built on breaking the law is not ok. 59nadir is right, you can build a great product while following the rules. Disruption is awesome, but 'disruption' is not - and it worries me how often the latter gets unabashed praise.
I'm comfortable with the idea that people can distinguish between rules designed to protect society and rules cynically implemented to protect entrenched interests that have cozied up to government. The latter deserve to be flouted. That's how we eventually get rid of them.
There is a reason that pg looks for "naughtiness" in founders.
> I'm comfortable with the idea that people can distinguish between rules designed to protect society and rules cynically implemented to protect entrenched interests
I'm not. Or rather, I'm not comfortable that some player won't explicitly break rules while trying to use "But the rules are cynically implemented to protect entrenched interests!" as cover. Why am I not comfortable? Because I've met several of these people throughout my life.
Of course they'll want the protections when it's in their best interest.
Naughtiness, rule bending, finding loopholes...there is a lot of gray area that we can all debate endlessly about.
Likely the automated test software they made falls in that area - and isn't what concerned me personally.
Willingly using unlicensed or wrong-state-licensed brokers though? Lobby for reciprocal/no licensing, work on a study course to make time-to-license faster, or just, you know...get your people licensed. As a business you follow laws even if you don't like them. Your hand waving an acceptance of fraud by zenefits - when they could and should have been in compliance - seems very worship-y and disruptors-know-best.
AirBNB broke rules to get where they are (craigslist spam comes to mind)
Uber broke rules to get where they are (spamming Lyft drivers with fake requests, operating in markets where a Taxi license was required without doing the paperwork or paying the fees, picking up people in taxi-only areas (like Chicago airports) ).
The sad thing about all of this is that punishments are often so weak, the game theory optimal play IS to break the rules. If you break the rules, succeed, and get caught.. you still end up winning. If you follow the rules and fail, you are still failed.
To make game theory sense of this problem, you would need extreme punishments. Like founders in jail for 20 years or executed. The problem with this, is clearly some new businesses broke rules by accident. Opps you accidentally sold 1 insurance policy in a state you didn't have a license, let's execute you - not cool.
Funny you mention airbnb and uber, two of the worst offenders that I avoid because they won't follow the rules. You are 100% correct on the punishments not having impact for the winners, a scaling system of some sort is probably needed and smarter people than I are needed to figure it out. It's also frustrating because the end goal - in uber's case, I can't stand 99% of taxi services and they deserve to lose business even in locations the regulation isn't an outright racket - is noble.
Zenefits _knew_ they were breaking the licensing laws and had a huge number of violations. It wasn't accidental, which would a totally different discussion.
At least for me, it's less about worship-yness and more about disdain for what I see as overregulation. I certainly can see how others disagree with me here though. shrug
