Technology

The availability of capital for this type of organization, the capital concentration on the opposing side and its market power is what's holding us back.

To elaborate:

Coops are fundamentally anti-capitalist, they're socialist. Why? Because they threaten to change the capitalist model where only people who hold significant capital get to decide how to profit from most workers' labour, to a model where most workers decide that democratically and equally own their workplaces. If coops are to become the dominant firm structure, it means no more Zuckerbergs or Thiels wielding unimaginable power over hundreds of thousands of employees directly* and the rest of the economy indirectly. This means that the people in this position of power today would do everything they can to stop coops from taking significant root. Since they are the VCs that dole out capital for startups, that means no capital for coop startups from them. It also means applying every market and non-market leverage they have to kill any coops that threaten to become viable competitors.

This doesn't mean we can't start coops and make them successful. It does however means it's much more difficult than starting a normal capitalist-funded startup. People who are in a position to attempt it probably should. I think a lot of capable, professional tech comrades would join and work a lot harder than they would at your typical startup. But it would still be an uphill battle without gov't support which already goes to capitalist tech corpos. This is why this battle has to go on multiple fronts. One is creating coops where and when possible. The other is unionizing existing corpos to gain labour power that can be leveraged to curb the oligarch's power. The third is fighting at the political level for state funding for coops and labour rights. Those three reinforce each other in increasing the economic power of employees (workers) both at coops and traditional corpos relative to the power of the oligarch (capitalist) class.

* For example forcing their employees to develop software for digital addiction instead of working to eliminate misinformation on the biggest social network in the world at the threat of termination.