Here's a list of worker co-ops:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives

Self-directed businesses are totally viable - until they need funding. Then any approach to possible investors is likely to be met with "Ha ha ha ha no."

We simply don't have a culture that supports non-hierarchical businesses. There are no role models in the media, hardly anyone has personal experience of a working in a co-op, and most of the population doesn't even know what a worker co-op is.

Wall St and VCs are implacably hostile to any business model that gives workers economic power.

Given those challenges, the fact that successes still exist suggest the idea has unexplored potential.

You seem to be assuming bad faith in place of a more likely explanation.

Various models of funding are predicated on taking equity, either directly in exchange for cash or as collateral for a loan. The problem is that as soon as you issue equity to investors, the business isn't worker-owned (and, crucially, worker controlled) anymore, it's (at least partially) investor owned.

It seems to work when it starts as a benevolent dictator taking care of employees. I like examples with razor-thin margins since they show the rest could probably pull it off:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the-wal...

It's more a right mix between worker's ideas and worker-approved management, though, instead of purely worker-directed. Same happened with Ricardo Semler's company that was even more radical.

Communes exist, and people start them regularly. Unfortunately, they tend to be unstable and disintegrate. The most famous one is probably San Francisco's "Summer of Love" in 1967. It lasted just a few months.

It's a stretch to describe the Summer of Love, even just in San Fransisco, as a commune. If anything, there were many communes that existed or maybe started in that time.

Not a stretch at all. There were organized efforts to provide free food, clothing, shelter, health care, and entertainment. People were encouraged to contribute what they could, or nothing at all, entirely up to them. They thought they were building the perfect society.

Probably similar to herding cats – too many opinions and too many directions to get pulled in. My girlfriend worked in an artists' co-op with equal share and high level of democracy. Everybody's ideas are always great so as to not to hurt anybody's feelings and if anything needs to get done, it takes weeks of roundabout talk just to end up with a monstrosity full of compromises.

I guess there needs to be some degree of hierarchy, just like with state elections, to constrict opinions and epitomise the main idea so there are not too many cooks undoing each other's work.