I would look at what your efforts are doing, net. Make a software company that helps people keep track of their finances through an app?  You are saving the [size of your userbase] * [hours per year each person saves or (hundreds of dollars in unneeded spending the person avoids)].  There are ways it might seem zero sum.  For example, Microsoft Excel.  It's a tool that saves billions of hours versus pre-computer days, but some could argue that by occupying the niche it squats in, it prevents investment into maybe superior tools like (mathematica, google sheets, open office).   Make a software company that performs high frequency crypto trades?  Arguably this is kind of zero sum - any money you scoop up is money left on the table by less sophisticated investors.  Essentially you are skimming wealth from a whole bunch of people without creating any. Say I make a software company that develops the software to adapt robotics platforms (like machines from Boston Dynamics) to do real world tasks.  Probably this is absolutely a net good: in the long term, those robots are doing labor humans would have been stuck doing, and our civilization gets richer [once it finds a new job for the people the robots unemployed].  But in the short term, yes, your company workers won't be too welcome at the factory you visit when designing the robots.