[clairity]

> but the general idea isn't "price below what is sustainable by taking in massive amounts of funding until all of your competitors are sunk and then increase prices."

so there shouldn't be any startups then?

because every startup is unsustainable at the beginning. every startup wants to beat its competition and emerge as the sole winner. every startup wants to raise prices and make more money.

capitalism is an economic system where individuals own (and deploy) the means of production, not the state. capitalism employs competition to ensure those means of production are put to productive uses for the whole economy, not just the individual. profits (or more directly, the accumulation of wealth) are non-productive until redeployed.

that's exactly the way capitalism is designed to work.

[EpicEng]

>because every startup is unsustainable at the beginning. every startup wants to beat its competition and emerge as the sole winner. every startup wants to raise prices and make more money.

With the idea that they will eventually become sustainable. And let's not pretend that manu (most?) startups are a massive cash sink-hole run by people who don't really know what they're doing. Regardless, if your startup's plan is to start cheap, grow their user base until they have a network effect, and then raise their prices significantly _and_ the product they offer can be easily replicated... then yes, that startup should probably not exist.