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Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?
229 points by peridotoak on Aug 15, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 255 comments
For a few years now, there's been a rising tide of activism and talk of capitalism 2.0 -- is anyone actually riding this wave, or is it mostly talk?

If anyone is actively working on (or with) a social enterprise, or if you know of any, I'd really appreciate it if you can loop me in!

Thank you in advance!




We started Mullvad VPN in 2009 for political reasons.

My cofounder Daniel and I viewed it as direct political action through entrepreneurship. In particular we wanted to protest Swedish surveillance legislation (FRA), which is partly why we chose a Swedish name for the service.

So far we have refused at least five serious offers of investment and acquisition, because we would rather retain control, even if that meant slow growth or obscurity.

As time went by the company grew and so did our capabilities to affect change. So far we have reinvested all profit in things we believe move the needle in the right direction. Some are direct donations, others are pure investments, others should probably be classified as "high-risk bets that might make things better, but not necessarily for us".

The fact that we retain 100% ownership in the company enables us to engage in strategic behavior that is unavailable to competitors who accept outside investment. All VCs have investment horizons. If we invited one onboard they would eventually want us to sell, or commit to handing out dividends.

We'd rather build some kind of institution. Even better if we can obsolete VPN services as a concept. Then we could move on to other problems. It's not like there's a shortage. We have explored the idea of moving our shares to a foundation. Unfortunately that is an action that can't be undone. It's kind of the point, but by retaining the shares we retain maximum strategic flexibility.

Edit: I don't identify as a social entrepreneur, but thought you might enjoy the story anyway, as we're also sort of optimizing for impact. Whatever that means.


I see you take Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, any reason you don't take Monero? Monero is the most private cryptocurrency in existence, and if you want maximum privacy you could use this so customers don't need to mix their coins first.


It's a false security, and it can induce you to break opsec when they break monero privacy again.


Monero has never been compromised, despite hypothetical attacks from researchers, which have since been patched. No evidence of their use has ever been established, unlike many traces used as evidence in court from Bitcoin transactions.


Thank you for the story and insight, I find it mirrors a lot of Chamath Palihapitiya's perspective on capital being an instrument for change.

What are the hardest challenges you're facing lately in operating a privacy focused VPN service?


As for our current hardest challenge:

Good question. As an organization probably helping each other ensure we stay focused on what needs to be done and what is right for the organization, weighing Time/Cost/Quality, and so on.

I'm not saying we're bad at it, it's just that remaining vigilant on keeping the feedback-adaptation loop short seems key, regardless of layer on the reality stack so to speak. On that subject, check out complexity science if you want your mind blown on the extent of recurring themes in physics, chemistry, biology, economics, computer science, etc.

Personally I have definitely struggled with perfectionism in the past, and still do to some extent. This greatly impacted my productivity, and those around me. Thankfully we hired a great CEO four years ago and I've since focused mostly on strategy and research. I've also rectified my perfectionism issue a bit :)

This is what I've been doing for the past two years, and anticipate spending time on for another few: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2019/6/3/system-transparency-fut...


Do you have any pointers for people who'd like to dig into complexity science?


Yes. Well, capital used correctly gives you leverage. Sort of the same. That can be used for a social net good or bad.

Related, I definitely agree with others in the thread that profit can be a measure of social impact. Whether your impact is positive or negative however depends on what solution you offer as an entrepreneur, and to what problem. Two farmers might have the same profit, but one is selling ecological greens, and the other one is selling high-fructose corn syrup. One is contributing to the obesity epidemic, the other one isn't.

In any case, the core of entrepreneurship is solving problems for people and organisations. The more people value and use your products and services the more profit you'll make, assuming your business model is economically sustainable. And you should want it to be! If your costs grow faster than your revenue, there's going to be a point where you have to shut down and can't help more people.


As a customer, I didn’t know any of this explicitly, but a lot of it seems a little implicit from the copy on your site and the way you do business.

I also appreciate the support and visibility you provide for WireGuard.

Thanks for running the service, it’s great!


I've been a Mullvad customer for several years now and love it - thank you for the service.


Have you ever considered adding trackers blocking functionality to your VPN like [Jumbo](https://www.jumboprivacy.com/)? They use the device's VPN API to block over 400 trackers like google analytics and facebook trackers. The problem is if you want to use a VPN AND block trackers you can't do both. I wonder if there's a way to integrate the two so one VPN does both things


The best way to do this for privacy concerned individuals would be on device through DNS. On iPhone or Android that means an app would need to be built.

My dream VPN app allows me to choose my protocol, DNS adblocking, multi provider integration, and VPN tunneling. Not sure what is all possible on iOS though. Passepartout is what I currently use, but it doesn’t support wireguard.


This is amazing!

Was there anything you found difficult about balancing the for-profit and for-impact motives?

Is there any framework you used to help you make these kinds of decisions?


Worthy to note that Mozilla VPN is using Mullvad as a service.


I gave up using Federal Reserve Notes, on principal, and have dedicated my life to improving a small ranching community. By limiting my use of money to less than $100 a month (hopefully soon $0), I've had to build connections with human beings that would have not been possible otherwise.

It was really eye opening to realize that the universe wants to play and it will help me in the strangest ways.

I've set up a community computer lab entirely based on e-waste collected for free that has a print-shop, network, big screens, projectors, electronics lab, etc and organized a few hackathons to see what services we can offer to the community.

I'm spearheading reopening the local community center and are setting up a tool-library with donated tools. You'd be amazed how many people have workshops filled with tools they never use and will give to you if you ask nicely and with a purpose.

I've begun to map all the trees in town, set up a gleening team, and building out solar dehydrators. Gonna stock the local shop with dried fruit right next to the candy isle. Give the kids a choice.

I've got hundreds (soon thousands) of baby trees in my back yard and have been setting up a gene bank for grafting many varieties of fruit and nut trees. Grafted a couple hundred apple, pear, plum, and cherry trees this last spring. Propogating out all the materials we will need to turn this town into a veritable food forest. With patience you can create orchards without spending a single dollar.

We live in the most wasteful society that has ever existed. I'm exploring the hack of seeing how much of this "waste" can be turning into things that people would have had to spend dollars, which to me is adding fuel to the flame that is rapidly destroying everything of true value on this planet.

Mother Earth.


> I've set up a community computer lab entirely based on e-waste collected for free that has a print-shop, network, big screens, projectors, electronics lab, etc and organized a few hackathons to see what services we can offer to the community.

This is brilliant, why don't community organizations spring up all over to do this?


I concur entirely, and I second this! This is brilliant!

Hey, if you don't mind my asking, where is this community computer lab located?

I wouldn't mind stopping by someday if I was in the area -- and I'm sure other HN readers who are local to you wouldn't mind stopping by either!


This is simply amazing, thank you for your impactful work. Any tutorials for grafting fruit trees you can recommend to a complete beginner?


I have an old mentor that tought me. I've been staying with him thought the years helping out on his orchard. I'm sorry but I haven't researched any online tutorials. It's not hard though. Really not hard. You can go into all the root-stocks and such, but if your in for old-school and easy and importantly, to me at least, free, get a small fenced garden plot to make your starting place, collect apple seeds, plant them and you'll have the beginnings of an orchard next spring. Apple pressing parties are the best. Collect the remains from a few pressings and just plant them. Boom, as many apple trees as you want. The fruit will be variable but, you never know, you might discover an amazing variety. These are then your rootstocks in a year or so. Collect scions from trees you like in the late winter and whip-and-tongue graft them onto your stock in the spring either as bench-grafting or top-grafting. Orchards without needing to spend a dollar. They'll be full-size trees that will long outlive you.


Thank you kindly for sharing your knowledge.


Are you documenting this at all? YouTube or blogs?


Please record this and write about in a wiki unless you have done that already.


I would love to read more about this.


I second this!


Real life Stardew Valley


2016 - While working as an engineer at Google, I decided to start a free coding bootcamp on the side. I believed I could teach anyone how to become a software engineer so I made a public post asking if anyone is interested in learning how to code and about 30 people showed up at my house. While I was at work in Mountain View, 30 people strangers used my house as a coding bootcamp.

2017 - 30 students were hard to manage and students started leaving. It bothered me, so I quit my job at Google to focus on this full time. I reached out to the students who left to see what happened and one of the reasons was money. So for the students who are struggling financially, I started giving them 2k / mo stipend.

2018 - Paying 9 students 2k / month used up all of my savings so I had to look for a new job. Also started a non-profit to write off all my payments as donations. This helped alot because to keep paying the students I took out my 401k savings and the donations helped offset the tax penalty.

2019 - Students got jobs. Realized that I want to train students to become good solid engineers that I want to work with instead of gamifying the interview process. Instead of padding resume and LeetCode, our curriculum focuses on building good products with good tests and maintainable code.

2020 - Ran into financial trouble, had to let all the students go and gave them a 3 month notice.

Now I'm primarily lurking on the chatroom of our final product, helping and teaching students who are following my curriculum.

https://c0d3.com

Next year I will get more RSUs and with that money I plan to kickoff a free code house, a safe environment for students to learn (much like 42) with free food and housing.


Please stop throwing good money after bad. You’ve proven that your approach doesn’t work, stop it!

Go find yourself a more business-minded partner in this undertaking so that it can be financially sustainable.

Noble intentions are great but in the end you will be left with nothing and unable to help anybody.


The only thing here that "doesn't work" is that there aren't enough people like the OP. He's helped dozens of people learn a worthwhile, mind expanding skill that pays well enough to have a family.

Let the man help people. He's got plenty of time to make back money and I highly doubt that after helping all these people that in the end he'll be left with nothing. He already has more than most people.


> You’ve proven that your approach doesn’t work, stop it!

I haven't proven anything yet and I have learned alot. You seem to have reached a conclusion though, care to share how?


You spent 4 years failing to find a sustainable, repeatable model with economics that work.

Right now it’s a matter of when you burn out, not if.


How are you planning to keep this sustainable for the long term? Burning out one's personal finances doesn't sound like it furthers your mission/passion.


The way I see it, I'm paying to study how people learn and how people's standing in society affects their learning. It is very interesting and definitely opened my eyes and helped change my philosophy in life.

I haven't learned enough to confidently strategize a way to keep this sustainable, because I noticed a pattern between people who don't do well and their personality (but I can't quite put my finger on it). I'm still observing and trying to figure this one out.


You probably should add a 5-20% take of atttendees first 6 month or year pay. You could argue that is 'expensive', but the value add for the students is probably more than they made otherwise with no upfront cost. Your incentives are aligned, and this could help you enroll even more students.

The alternative of you no longer providing the service is worse.


> ...but the value add for the students is probably more than they made otherwise with no upfront cost.

I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for. I'd rather have them keep their money so they can help improve the world in their own way.

> The alternative of you no longer providing the service is worse.

Worse for who? Society? I don't believe it is my job to fix societal problems. I can help in a way that makes it fun and interesting for me and if any of the graduates want to continue providing the service and charge 5-20% of the students pay, they are free to launch their own service. Everything is open source.


> I really don't want to set a precedence of charging students for something I don't think they should be paying for.

What do you think students shouldn't be paying for? Education?

Some people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for learning materials and a certificate of completion. Up front. With no guarantee of future income. And no refund if you don't finish.

Offering learning materials that only cost money if you profit from them seems like a much better alternative.


I don't think students should pay for education, correct. I would enjoy life more if education was free and I'm free to pursue whatever I wanted to learn.

It would be even cooler if I was paid to learn so teachers get to experiment with all different ways to teach and they are fully vested into my growth.


Everything has costs. Nothing is free. Public education funding has to come from somewhere so that educators can eat and classrooms can be built and maintained.

Financial transactions are not inherently bad. They are one half of value transfer. In your case, a win-win situation.


> Everything has costs. Nothing is free. Public education funding has to come from somewhere so that educators can eat and classrooms can be built and maintained.

If you believe that, then it will be true for you. Alot of things are free. If you plant a potato you can end up with a whole field of potatoes that you can eat forever, for free. And all the potatoes you don't eat decomposes back into the soil and makes the soil healthier.

Nature is fundamentally free and abundant and I can't figure out why our society isn't. Everyone around me seems to conclude that nothing is free though so maybe there's something I see that others don't, or there's something everyone else sees that I don't.


Time has value, and economies of scale make it more efficient. I worked at a CSA for a while and the amount of time it would take an individual to have the diversity of foods we provide would have taken them far longer. I have nothing against gardening on its own, but the marginal value add of doing something else yourself doesn’t always exceed the value of your time and the opportunity cost of not doing something else.

You could always live an AnPrim lifestyle and that’s fine (one of Kaczynski’s main points was that specialization in the abstract is incompatible with people), but there are more obvious reasons why more people don’t do that.


Give them the chance to participate and give back to their society as well!


> because I noticed a pattern between people who don't do well and their personality (but I can't quite put my finger on it)

can you talk about this?


I'm not really comfortable talking about this because is just speculation and I don't have enough time / data to defend my position. If you have specific questions though please contact me.


Have you thought of maybe investing in real estate or something? I want to do this and get others to join and do it, then use the proceeds to pay medical bills for people. But, if you can get recurring monthly income from something, then that could fuel some endeavor like this.


Just wondering, how do you vet the people that apply? I can imagine a lot of people would love to "earn" a free 2k a month and would happily play along doing the bare minimum amount of work required.

I contemplated doing something similar in London (not paying money per-se, but providing a location & good hardware for the students to use) but was kind of worried about ending up with an office full of freeloaders that just enjoy the amenities provided without caring about the curriculum itself.

I've experimented with a few people I know that are stuck in bullshit jobs and gave them hardware, software and any books/resources they'd need to learn programming, but while they are very grateful for it I haven't actually seen any progress or frankly even long-term motivation.


> Just wondering, how do you vet the people that apply? I can imagine a lot of people would love to "earn" a free 2k a month and would happily play along doing the bare minimum amount of work required.

I think people that never worked in the public sector, particularly in something like social services, overestimate the goodness (for the lack of a better word) of average people. People that do this usually come from highly-competitive and privileged backgrounds -- top tier universities, FAANG jobs, etc. And the assumption is that "anyone else" could have made it, too! Everyone is just as stubborn, just as motivated, and just as smart. But FAANG jobs and top-tier universities are self-selecting.

There's a nugget of truth here, and we shouldn't forget what Rawls taught us about the Veil of Ignorance[1], but the reality is that social mobility (particularly in the West) is at a historic all time high. I'm not saying don't donate or don't give back (as a Christian, I feel a moral obligation, in fact, to donate to the less fortunate), but just that implementing welfare policies or -- as @songzme did -- giving resources away, is pretty tricky. Not only do you want to avoid the Free-rider problem[2], but you also want to make sure that people won't end up being wholly dependent on the resources they're the beneficiaries of.

[1] https://fs.blog/2017/10/veil-ignorance/

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/


You comment was downvoted but I upvoted it because you bring up a valid point. I've noticed first hand the free-rider problem and I have mixed feelings.

I thought it was interesting that all students with the free-rider symptoms did not feel good about free-riding. They tried to help out and feel bad when we meet for 1-1 and they haven't done much.

Sometimes, I feel like I'm actually fighting against FAANG because these companies are spending billions trying to capture as much of my students' attention as possible and I have to spend more time helping manage my students out of these distractions.

I'm actually starting to wonder if the free-rider problem exists because of FAANG creating addictive content and the media glorifying a certain lifestyle. If students were not exposed to these distractions, would they still be free-riding? I honestly don't think so and my next year's plan is to try and simulate this.


The economy of distraction is indeed a fucked up economy... there are just 24h in a day. And we have billionaires competing for our attention. Creating opium-like content and experiences (tv, social media, videogames).

I wonder myself how deal with that in a systemic level. A society of consumers is bad... but a society that is a audience is worse.


That’s a pretty negative take on the work ethic of non-elites. While you’re correct that the institutions you mentioned select for intelligence, I’ve seen no evidence in a life lived among working class and professional-class individuals that there is any significant difference in work ethic. I wonder if you’re even aware how many poor and working-class individuals work 2 full-time jobs.

The reason why folks working in social services might have a different impression is that they’re primarily coming into contact with people who are in failure mode for a variety of reasons: addiction, health-issues, mental illness, etc. They are not representative of the poor and working classes in general, and their failure to maintain a strong work ethic is often impeded by their life challenges.

Also, the small percentage of freeloaders out there are very good at sniffing out opportunities for taking advantage of the system. That may make them seem more common than they actually are.

> but the reality is that social mobility (particularly in the West) is at a historic all time high

No idea about global social mobility, it’s entirely possible it’s at an all-time high. But you’re definitely wrong about social mobility in the USA. It’s been declining for many, many decades:

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/1/251

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_th...

A few studies show that the decline in social mobility may be leveling off, but if that’s the case (and even that isn’t clear-many studies show the opposite), then almost certainly the financial crisis and COVID will reverse that trend.


> That’s a pretty negative take on the work ethic of non-elites.

Nowhere in my post did I mention elites. In fact, many of my FAANG co-workers were not elites. Tech fares much better here than, say, investment banking.

> While you’re correct that the institutions you mentioned select for intelligence

That's not what I said at all -- if I had to say they selected for one thing, I'd say that the institutions I mentioned probably select for conscientiousness.

> Also, the small percentage of freeloaders out there are very good at sniffing out opportunities for taking advantage of the system...

Again, this is spoken like someone that's never worked in social services and is used to the "social niceties" that something like an Ivy-league education or a cozy tech job offers. I'd prefer looking at this in the abstract (because studies will always be politicized), and freeloading can definitely be an optimal strategy[1].

> But you’re definitely wrong about social mobility in the USA.

Oh come on, at least let's be fair. This is a contentious issue and there are disagreements here. Some say it's gone down, others say it's gone up[2].

[1] https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q3/game-theory...

[2] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/05/14/two-leadi...


> That's not what I said at all

Well, what did you mean by “just as smart”?? Most working class men and women are in fact fairly conscientious. The institutions you mentioned do select for higher IQ. Are you claiming that software development does not require a higher IQ than a typical non-professional job? There’s a lot of psychological research that suggests otherwise.

> act, many of my FAANG co-workers were not elites.

By any reasonable definition, anyone working as a software developer in a FAANG is an elite. Most of you are in the top 1% income-wise. Most of you share the same cultural values, and live in the same isolated environment (note: I’m generalizing - that may not apply to you personally).

> this is spoken like someone that's never worked in social services and is used to the "social niceties" that something like an Ivy-league education or a cozy tech job offers

Are you talking about me here, or the OP? If me, it’s particularly amusing. I went to a state school, never worked for a FAANG, and have actually worked in social services (for a charity, for 2 years). I have a very different view of working class work ethic than you do. Most people work hard.

By the way, have you worked in the public sector, or in social services?

> ...contentious issue...

No, it’s really not a contentious issue. The title of the article you referenced is misleading, if you read the whole article. Heckman doesn’t claim that social mobility is going up. He just believes that the data isn’t as bad as Chetty claims it is. The vast majority of research in this area shows declining social mobility. Some of it suggests the long decline in mobility may be leveling off. None I’m aware of suggest it’s rising.

Read Piketty, Chetty, and Milanovic. The data is clear. In the US, social mobility has been dropping for decades, and income/wealth inequality rising. For me personally, coming from small town USA, and in my own large extended family, I have significant anecdotal evidence to back this up.


> For me personally, coming from small town USA, and in my own large extended family, I have significant anecdotal evidence to back this up.

You make some fair points, and maybe our life experiences are just vastly different. Having grown up in abject poverty (post-Communist Eastern Europe), migrated to the States when I was 11 with my family, and watched my parents struggle and, to a certain extent, "make it" in America, the idea that there's no social mobility in the US is foreign to me. And this applies to my extended family as well.

Keep in mind that my grandparents don't even have 4 years of school, so it's not like I'm some blue-blood elite. The opportunities that the US gave me and my family make me immensely proud to call myself an American.


You have a great story. Out of 100 people in abject poverty in the US, how many do you think ended up like you to "make it"?

Rather than talk about your story and how you were able to "make it", I think it'll be really cool if you found a way to help open up this social mobility so that is is accessible for more people.

That's what I'm trying to do anyways. I've moved quite a few people from 40k / year (whole family) to making 150k / year. You not only learn alot by doing that, you can also create miracles in people's lives.


I think your wrong about the "all time high social mobility" my understanding is that the peak was reach 40 years ago. I'm currently reading Thomas Piketty on the subject


40 years ago, most of Eastern Europe was under North Korea-like Communism, China was still enforcing the one-child policy, and South Africa was still under Apartheid. Not to mention the looming fear of nuclear annihilation. I’m not sure how 40 years ago, we were better off.

But I’ll look into Thomas Piketty.


> Just wondering, how do you vet the people that apply?

No vetting process, it was first come first served. As long as a student kept showing up, I will do everything I can to help. I don't advertise paying students, I offer it after I've seen them make some progress.

> I can imagine a lot of people would love to "earn" a free 2k a month and would happily play along doing the bare minimum amount of work required.

This actually happened to a few students. But in their defense, I would do the same. If I had been struggling month to month and suddenly I get a chance to breath and relax, I would relax.

I've been trying to condition myself to be okay giving money to people and not expecting anything in return (in the spirit of basic income). It is a hard path to take emotionally but I am making progress.

> I contemplated doing something similar in London (not paying money per-se, but providing a location & good hardware for the students to use) but was kind of worried about ending up with an office full of freeloaders that just enjoy the amenities provided without caring about the curriculum itself.

This will happen. People will find a way to build a community with regular parties and alcohol and weed and other drugs will come in. Some students will start binge watching TV shows, start gaming, etc. You need to make sure to set some fundamental rules.

The way I plan to solve this (next year) could be very controversial, but I believe it based on my experiences so far: No internet until you finish the curriculum, no alcohol, no drugs. Maybe also no meat but that's still up in the air.

> I've experimented with a few people I know that are stuck in bullshit jobs and gave them hardware, software and any books/resources they'd need to learn programming, but while they are very grateful for it I haven't actually seen any progress or frankly even long-term motivation.

That's how I started and the reason why there is no long-term motivation is that there is nobody around them to help them manage their feelings. Once you help them manage their feelings, their drive is infinite.

If you want to talk more, shoot me a message in the chatroom on c0d3.com (my username is gnos), I'll be happy to share everything (curriculum, apps that powers the curriculum, vision, etc).


> The way I plan to solve this (next year) could be very controversial, but I believe it based on my experiences so far: No internet until you finish the curriculum, no alcohol, no drugs. Maybe also no meat but that's still up in the air.

Sounds like today’s version of a 17th century monastery. Maybe, you should push it further


that is the plan. No phones between 8am - 8pm, like a true bootcamp :)


If this can help you ... From my own experience, I advise you that you should also ban music, external noises and any other distractions ... Basically to make your students bored and that the only thing that "entertains" them is to code in the computer.

By the way, I would be interested to know more about your project and its progress, if you could give me some form of contact I would greatly appreciate it.


hn at hoie dot kim


I sincerely hope the students that went on to become full time developers paid you back handsomely to pay it forward to future students, otherwise you have nothing to retire with if you sacrificed your life savings. I hope your altruism is rewarded because you are such a good person for doing this. Maybe take donations and create a fund from wealthy tech enthusiasts?


Thanks, but I've come to realize that I'm not altruistic so I want to clarify so you don't leave with the wrong message.

I'm using my wealth to build a learning environment and remove obstacles so I can observe what the true barriers to learning are. I essentially created my own lab because it was too much work to convince others to create it for me.

So, I'm not the good person that my story seems to convey, just curious.


Well I for one am happy that your deep seated curiosity is so aligned with an altruistic cause that despite my typical trait of believing people when they describe their motivations I still have some doubt about your true motivations. I've taught a number of people software or data science for free. And yes, teaching is its own reward and seeing people that you've taught land gigs as data scientists at companies like Shopify is gratifying, but ultimately it would be dishonest of me to say that my teaching others was purely for selfish reasons. It wasn't. I like helping people and I wish more people did too.

Thanks for doing what you're doing and please keep pushing forward to make the world a better place.


Thanks for doing this. This is really awesome of you but you need to find some way to subsidize the cost in the long term.

Have you got any ideas?

I am thinking for-profit divisions such as a hiring agency (you will be able to fix the hiring processes) and training services for interns and juniors of companies, etc. You can sell enterprise subscriptions that companies can pay to give their employees access to training material whilst still providing an open source version via GPL.

Maybe crowd funding. Some kind of lambda school agreement or help spin off companies from projects and take a cut.

I would love to talk more about this. I am starting a similar endeavour as a hobby. Email is in the profile.


will reach out and we can bounce ideas :)


This was one of my dreams, using my excess wealth to do some form of subsidized education with my twist on it, as an alternative to hoarding it all and ignoring requests for handouts, providing no opportunity to earn the money.

Thanks for spelling out the financial disaster that is, pass.


good. It is difficult, but interesting.


I think what you're doing is absolutely brilliant, despite the financial difficulties, which are not your fault, because you're a programmer -- not a businessman (don't feel bad, I'm sort of in the same boat, and many users/posters of HN are in that same boat too...)

But the fact that you're helping others is absolutely awesome!

More power to you, and I'm sure if you persist down this path, you'll figure out better ways to handle the financial side of things!

Business is its own learning process -- much like programming was a long time ago! <g>

Anyway, best of luck with your endeavors!


thank you!


Really nice!

"After completing our curriculum, you will gain access to our internal code repository that powers c0d3.com"

Out of curiosity, why aren't you opensourcing the code? That would make it easier for your students to showcase their contributions and how they communicate.

My personal experience when I was a gsoc admin was that it was hard to get the students stick around after the end of the summer, do you manage and have some tips to share?


it is open source: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app

It used to be closed source, but it was only because I wasn't confident about the quality of the codebase. Now it is much better.

> My personal experience when I was a gsoc admin was that it was hard to get the students stick around after the end of the summer, do you manage and have some tips to share?

First you should realize that some people just don't really see the point in coding. These people are just going to wander off.

The ones who are dedicated though, its important to spend time to talk to them and make sure your project aligns with their goals. Then they will contribute above and beyond. Our project mission is simple because most students want an engineering job: Working on c0d3.com repository will not only help you gain the skills as a software engineer, it also counts as work experience and makes your resume look amazing.

Does your gsoc project lead to a full time job conversion? 100% of the people I know who did gsoc did it with only one goal in mind: get a full time job.


I run a company that collects and delivers used furniture for charities in the UK (https://boxmove.com)

It’s a social enterprise in the sense that we save charities a fortune on the way they currently operate, and we employ our staff on better salaries than they receive working in-house. The flip side is we expect a decent day’s work from our teams. We are profitable, sustainable and no reliant on grants, funding, or anything else. That’s good for everybody.

Those that join us from charities typically did 6-8 jobs a day. Our teams average 20. There is so much bullshit and incompetence in the charity sector that I would love to call out, but sadly that would damage our business. It is a frustrating sector to operate in - not least because we compete against ‘serial social entrepreneurs’ who receive a grant, take a nice salary for two years nibbling away at our client base, then shut down and move onto the next self-enriching project.

Not really sure why I answered this question but there you go!


Can you explain how charities could be more efficient? Curious to hear more on that subject


Thank you for the share, Alex! I found your frustration to be quite curious: why would calling out the bullshit and incompetence be damaging to your business?

I'd imagine that a huge part of your pitch is that you're MUCH more efficient and therefore you can save on costs if they outsource to your business.


OP runs a for-profit company with Non-profit customers. If they share a lot of stories about how inefficient the non-profits are, that could hurt those non-profits financially or just emotionally. Either of these would disincline the non-profit from continuing to be a customer of OP’s moving company.

Everyone loves accountability until it’s applied to them!


If it makes you feel any better, from what I heard from a knowledgeable source, this is worse in medical field. A lot of people have gotten really good at milking Gates Foundation and alike for grants worth tens of millions. They do the song and dance to pretend that research is being done, and results are just around the corner; ten years later they rinse and repeat.

Perhaps the best you can do is to be one of the good ones, and put making a difference over making a load of cash.


I'm a little late to the party but this is really great.

I've been working on building out a list of resources for people interested in social enterprises (https://github.com/RayBB/awesome-social-enterprise)

Do you have any recommendations for resources that helped you get started or inspired you to start a social enterprise?

Also, do you mind if I add your social enterprise to my list of social enterprises?

Thanks!

peridotoak my shameless self plug for my repo above may be of interest to you!


I’ve been working for, running and volunteering for social enterprises for 12 years now.

I find that “social enterprise” as a term isn’t really known by anyone outside of the social enterprise bubble, e.g. those running, funding or volunteering for a social enterprise.

The funding structures available to social enterprises seems to be an issue - you can be anything from a private limited company through to a registered charity or anything in between (and don’t get me started on CICs...).

I know a fully for-profit company who claims they are a social enterprise just because their main client base is registered charities.

I also think that the B Corp movement (https://bcorporation.net/) is building a much better brand than the social enterprise movement - and the whole process to becoming a registered B Corp is much more stringent than become a social enterprise, and has the added benefit of helping improve the social impact of organisations that apply to become B Corp registered.

I’m currently building a database of social good organisations in the UK and beyond here: https://goodhere.org/

Would love to see more projects and funders submitted. Email is in profile if you’re interested in discussing more.


> I know a fully for-profit company who claims they are a social enterprise just because their main client base is registered charities.

Cynical me thinks that for-profit companies primarily work to benefit their executives and shareholders. Non-profit companies primary work to benefit their executives alone. How is this better? My source is overhead conversations in bars in Seattle where I heard Gates Foundation executives bragging about how they were getting paid $300,000 a year to do absolutely nothing.


> bragging about how they were getting paid $300,000 a year to do absolutely nothing

If I was doing this, I would feel guilty as hell and wouldn't tell a single soul. I'd probably also be looking for something else to do. The messed-up stuff some people boast about, it's sickening.


In vino veritas. You can learn a lot in bars if you drink soda water and lime and pay attention. Especially in hubs like Seattle or Mountain View.


Non-profits have to report financial, and in their 990 forms have to say all employees who make over 100k a year. You can look at them usually through the IRS website. Gates Foundation posts theirs here: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informati...

The only people making more than 300,000 are their 4 directors.


> where I heard Gates Foundation...

Oh, come on, that was one of the few places I semi-idealize as ethical and "clean".

Humans will be humans I guess...


I don't think this necessarily says anything to the contrary of that. If you are someone at Gates overseeing research grants etc, you probably have a PhD and I'm sure the Gates job is less stressful than doing your own research. I could very easily see how friends of mine would say such a position is "easy" compared to publishing yourself, being scooped, research failing, etc. Instead, you get paid well to help other people do the same. Nothing wrong with that - it's just perspective.

Granted, I didn't talk to this executive, but I feel somewhat comfortable hypothesizing this due to what I know of this area.


That sounds reasonable. Thanks for the perspective :)


If the source is a comment on HN from someone who says they overheard it in a bar then I wouldn't worry about it too much.


True that :)


+1 on B Corp certification being better than a “social enterprise”. I’ve seen so many companies call themselves social enterprises with little evidence of impact, which really amounts to a new form of greenwashing. B Corp helps solve that


We’re currently going through the B Corp process and even taking the initial questionnaire is improving the social impact side of our business and helping us plan for how we can improve here.

I’m sure B Corp as term suffers from the same issues as social enterprise does, namely who knows or cares what a B Corp is outside of those that have achieved B Corp status?

Sometimes it seems much simpler to just be a business and outline your social impact on your website and marketing materials, or register as a straight charity so there’s no questions asked.


Hey Ben! I took a look around GoodHere, and to be honest with you, this is similar to a product idea I had in mind (at its core but different in vision + implementation).

How are you looking to monetize the platform? Would you mind talking things over with a potential competitor?


Would be happy to chat, feel free to email (see bio).


> B Lab Takes a Stand: A Commitment to Justice and Anti-Racism

A lot of these organizations seem to be ideologically possessed by Critical Race Theory. The above snippet is essentially identical to:

> B Lab Takes a Stand: A Commitment to Dianetics and Scientology


I co-founded Akvo Foundation [1] in 2007. Akvo is a not-for-profit/not-for-loss [2] organisation that put together a combination of tools, services, local expertise and sector knowledge. We work mainly in management of water, sanitation and agriculture, even though organisations use our platform for all sorts of data. WWF are tracking turtles in Indonesia, SNV manages their massive biogas programmes, Sierra Leone quality test their drinking water etc. Lots of stories here https://akvo.org/stories/

We are 75 people in a bunch of countries, with HQ in The Netherlands. We have worked with two dozen governments, hundreds of organisations and companies, in over 70 countries in the last decade. We work hard at making all our tools and work open source or open content.

Working mainly in international development is not easy. The customer is mostly project based, so retention is hard. You have to sell into each new project. We have some of Europe’s largest NGOs using the tools as corporate tools, but the technology use in many of these type of organisations, despite being heavily dependent on data, is patchy at best.

[1] http://Akvo.org

[2] We charge money for our services and any positive results are reinvested in our tools, people and knowledge platform.


I founded a small company in my country doing this exact same format, but for energy and energy efficiency.

We have currently worked with our government and several other agencies, plus some overseas companies, and the struggles are basically the same.

>The customer is mostly project based, so retention is hard.

>but the technology use in many of these type of organisations, despite being heavily dependent on data, is patchy at best

Glad (kinda) to know I'm not the only one suffering with those problems. Sometimes is disheartening to struggle as a small company when working with this kind of entities.


We started with software only and quickly realised that our idea that others could do the implementation and consulting around the tools just didn't work. So we gradually had to set up hubs where we could provide the knowledge locally. That took quite a lot of effort. It works quite well though.


Send me an email if you ever want to do a collaboration here in Chile :) victor (at) vgr.cl


Why Netherlands for your HQ?


Looking at their "About us" page two of the cofounders have extremely Dutch names so it's probably just where they started out.


Two of our founders, (we were seven, 2xSE, 1xUK, 2xUS, 2xNL) where based in NL. They also had great connections to the government in NL that supported us to get started. And we were initially part of a project which was based in the NL.


I built a site (addictionlocker.com) which is a password manager that makes you donate to charity to get your passwords back.

I built it because everytime I try to lock myself out of twitter, et al, I just unlock whatever I set up because I know the password.

Originally, I was going to take a percentage of the profit; but now want to see all of it go to charity. What sucks is I think its a really solid idea; benefits everyone involved (reduces addictive screen time, gives money to givewell.org) but can't market it to save my life. I don't know if the concept is too esoteric, or everyone is ok with how much time they look at their phone, or my site just isn't good...

Please share if you find success...


I like this idea, but both credit card info and password is a big trust ask for what looks like a fairly random website.


Do you think it would help if it was open sourced?

Credit card info is handled by square who Iframes all user inputs so I can’t see it.

Password to unlock the pw you need a key, nonce, encrypted message. My server only ever sees the nonce and message. The user only ever has all 3. Even the bookmarks you create use hash-bangs which don’t go over the wire.

The hard part for me is conveying all of that without a wall o’text.

Maybe I can reach out to givewell, and get their thoughts. They’d bless it maybe?


This seems like a great idea for a niche group of people. My initial recommendation is making the time limited option free. Currently the end user has to donate 1 dollar no matter what, right? For every individual password?


Thanks for the feedback!

You're correct; the audience is niche. I felt like this would be perfect for the typical hacker-news reader.

- Its a password manager - Its anonymous (no account to create) - It has a negative outlook on social-media and political news - Its an efficiency "hack" (kills time wasters)

You're correct in that its $1 / password to sign up. The way I'm using it now is I set up time-limits on my iPhone through screen time, then locked myself out of screentime. I've given myself 20 minutes on my phone's browser / day, and can't install apps. This way, I don't have to save a password for twitter, instagram, etc. I can still use them; but after 20 minutes they're blocked.

This cut my usage in half the first week I used it.

If you don't mind, can you elaborate on what you said about "making the time limited option free"?


I does seem like a great idea!


I also run a company [1] that primarily recruits low-income Brazilians from remote locations and teach them how to code and create data-related products. The company itself is for profit in the long run, but the first priority is to make our members grow (financially and psychologically), then generate profit for the founders.

During the entire process we focus 40% of their time to study/learn about soft skills (become a better person/human), 20% for hard skills (become a better professional) and 30% for producing code and create products, we pay 100% for all the courses and books they use to lean.

Every quarter we review and increase their monthly income based solely on their level of soft skills, not hard skills. So if they become more organized, have better communication, etc. they earn more. People can start as low as R$ 500,00 per month and grow up to R$ 25,000,00 per month.

In the end, our goal is to make each of them more (or totally?) lucid/self-aware (in the context of psychology) and financially independent (more than R$ 1 million on their bank account) in the maximum period of 10 years [2].

We have been doing it for the past 5 years, fully remote, and it's currently very close to becoming a sustainable process, as some of our current members are very lucid/self-aware and getting close (2-3 years away) to become financially independent.

[1] - https://www.simbioseventures.com/v/english/

[2] - https://www.simbioseventures.com/v/english/sobre-a-simbiose/...

Edit: clarification.


It is worth noting that a lot of people feel that you hire people very cheap and work them to their bones with a promise of a high salary. Working on weekends and 12h a day seem to be incentivized.

Some discussion here: https://github.com/frontendbr/vagas/issues/3084 and if you google for the python Brasil google groups there's a lot of bad reputation around the company.


Yes. This is true. There are some people with strong opinions about what we do, but the interesting part is that none of these people were part of our group before, they just criticize what they think we do, as they cannot criticize what we really do.

Anyway, we respect different opinions, but we are really focused on hearing the opinions of the people we already have inside our group, because they are the ones that truly understand what’s going on.


The github issue I posted has comments from employee reviews on glassdoor.

That said I wish you the best! It is really cool that you think of your business the way you do. I just find it very important to show to the HN community how other people feel about your business as well.


Unfortunately Glassdoor is a place where any random person can comment things, not necessarily real ex-members.

Only a few of the reviews we have at Glassdoor are real, the rest comes from internet haters. Even so, if you look a the numbers, you will see that even people that criticize us, 74% recommend the company to a friend.

It’s obvious that we have challenges, as any company, but apparently the benefits are higher than them.


I really like this approach. I am in the middle of building a process like this in another country. Would you be willing to discuss your process in more detail with me?

My email is in my profile.

Thank you for doing good in this world.


Absolutely. I will e-mail you.


I would like to hear about this too.


I'm working on a company to create a universal basic income utilizing technology instead of financial instruments. Doing that through building homes that run on renewable energy, grow their own food and are cheap to make.

The first prototype house should be done this year!


I started looking into doing something similar about 7 years ago. My primary advice is to nail down and narrowly define what you're doing with food early on, it's a huge distraction full of pitfalls.

Hopefully you're already aware that it's not really feasible for a household to grow enough food to live on-- better to be clear up front with everyone that it's to supplement groceries, not replace them. Focus on a few core crops you can gradually become more efficient at growing, and don't get too caught up on automation unless someone on your team has extensive experience with using it in agriculture. [Edit: I saw further below that you're already doing this, I guess all I can say is be aware of the limitations and try to have realistic expectations.]


This is amazing, I'd really love to learn more! Do you have any resources I can look into?


I don't have a website yet or anything so that I can solely focus on the building, but my email is in my profile.

Essentially, the prototype is a tiny house with greenhouse attachment. Looks like it will come in around ~$25k. The greenhouse is 95% automated using hydroponics and sensors for any adjustments to turn on ventilation, water alerts or ph alerts for making sure the nutrient solutions are where they need to be. We are currently experimenting with deepwater and nft hydroponic systems.

After the prototype, we are going to raise money to build the first neighborhood. Houses will be a bit bigger, ~1500 sq. ft. and be fairly modern style, potentially in Denver. Powered via Solar for now. And basically get 10 or so people to move in all with a skillset that could help push the technology and needle forward on how this could be implemented at a larger scale.


That's pretty good. From my experience just the greenhouse, foundation, growing apparatus, monitoring, growing supplies, and permitting would cost $25k. The labor costs and tiny house would easily put it over. I'd be curious in seeing the breakdown of costs.


> "..to create a universal basic income utilizing technology instead of financial instruments."

Wow. Just mind blowing. So much power in those few words. The best quote i have come across in probably a decade.


Interesting, care to share more?


Hey Tim!

Feel free to reach out, my email is in my profile.

But basically, its a fairly modular house, currently located in Colorado that uses solar for energy and a couple different hydroponic systems in an attached greenhouse. We've been looking at/building every step to understand where construction costs are coming from and what options are out there.

For example, we were quoted early on for part of the house foundation for $9k by multiple contractors, but when we asked a lot of questions we found we could get it done without any real skillset to do it ourselves with about 10 hours of work and $500. Work any volunteer could do. So, been working on cutting costs out of the process and working on automatically making food.

Next step is a small neighborhood to get more people involved and working towards figuring out how to expand it to a larger scale.


Hey gamerDude, I cant seem to find your email information in your profile either. Is there another way that we could connect? What you are describing is something I have been very passionate about but havent know where to start. I would love to help and be a part of this endeavor.


Hey there - very interested in corresponding with you but when clicking on your profile, there is no email listed. Is there some other way to start a thread? :)


Hey gamerDude,

I've been wanting to create something like this myself. Would love to join forces and learn more. What's a good way to contact you? Thx!


As mentioned, your email isn’t in your profile but would love more info on this as I am in a country where this would be a perfect fit.


I work at a small cooperative. We do contact management for non-profits (from large professional associations to small activist groups). It's an area where Salesforce is present, but there is a huge potential for growth, especially outside the US (data sovereignty).

We're a small worker owned coop, meaning we are basically a few partners doing hosting and consulting for the CRM. The CRM is open source, and we are many companies and organizations working together. They have become a very big family (with the good and sometimes the bad).

I like being my own boss and getting to chose my projects, while getting to work with really nice people (whether the clients or colleagues). Of course, no illusions, at the end of the day, we have to get the job done, on budget etc. It's not all rainbows, but I like it. You might say it takes a certain personality to be able to collaborate with alot of people on the long term. We all have weird personality traits. It requires patience.

In the same day, I might work with folks in France who work with animal shelters, people in Turkey who work with oppressed teachers, and small activist groups in the US who hide migrants from ICE.

Money isn't the end goal, but we still have salaries in the higher average, in our area. CRM isn't super exciting tech, but it quickly provides value to users.


I’m one.

Through SEAL, we fund academic research and take on impact campaigns on specific environmental initiatives.

We just called on financial institutions to create an environmental charity rewards card (a portion of your credit card rewards go to charity, not airline miles):

https://sealawards.com/eco-rewards/

The potential here is huge - could raise even more funding than Jeff Bezos $10 billion climate fund. And the consumer survey data (n - 3,000) is very encouraging.

Now the tough part is convincing them - if you want to help please visit https://ecorewardscard.com/sign-up/

My overall summary of social entrepreneurship: expensive (I subsidize this), hard....but really fun and rewarding.


Hi Matt, any chance we could talk? I run a business which helps developing country communities set up and manage green community “banks”. This is in communities which are conventionally unbankable but can manage simple community funds. We build ecosystem restoration requirements into loan terms and it’s looking like a successful approach to environmental management. We need to provide seed capital to community banks in order to get them going, and had been thinking about using the mechanism you are developing. Maybe we could partner? Here’s a case study showing how it works. http://greenfi.org/?page_id=627


Matt AT sealawards dot com


With the help of some friends, I started Sublime Fund (https://sublimefund.org/). It lets people donate to multiple charities on a monthly basis from one place, while maintaining their privacy. Sublime Fund is itself a 501(c)(3), and we don't keep any cut of the donations for ourselves (though we do deduct the cost of payment processing and distribution).

A lot of the motivation for building it came from my own desire to use it, so I've tried to make it as user-friendly as possible. For example, there are no attempts to add friction to the process of stopping donations to a charity. I can do it in seconds.

I've let development stagnate because I started a new job last year, but it requires very little maintenance to keep going, and I plan on getting back into it soon to build out new features.


In light of how the previous Mozilla CEO was forced out over private contributions to non-profits, do you see Sublime becoming more relevant given the current trend of deplatforming? Do you implement any policies or information assurance protocols that would e.g. prevent differential analysis or deanonymization your contributors by reporters/media? I think people would be more than happy that you charge a small fee for your services if stronger guarantees of privacy can be assured.


I co-founded a company to make carbon removal accessible to everyone (https://carbonremoved.com)

Idea is to avoid the dubious carbon credit system and instead actually remove your historical footprint.

We've been iterating on different variations of the product for a year and registered a company (we're Swiss based) in April. So far we are responsible for the removal of 26tons of CO2 and with our customer base we're now removing over 10tons per month.

In the grand scheme of things, we know it's a small step but by supporting multiple carbon removal providers (Direct Air capture and storage; tree planting; enhanced weathring through olivine stones (coming soon); biochar (coming soon)) we're aiming to make carbon removal affordable while maximizing our environmental impact.


First of all congrats on building a business that focuses on tackling climate change as its probably the most pressing global issue of all right now. However I’ve been struggling with the ethics of carbon removal and carbon offsets a bit myself and would be really interested in your perspective. If the ethical goal is to have the lowest atmospheric CO2 concentration in let’s say 2050, how do you justify funding carbon removal now at a time where the prevention of carbon creation is way cheaper per ton and thus allows people to have a higher impact regarding that goal for the same cost? Is it because you feel that with the right funding now carbon removal could eventually become much cheaper? I’m not trying to criticize you, I’m just really interested in the topic as something about carbon offsets always feels pretty sketchy and I’m always looking for ways to ethically invest or donate (I gave to an anti-deforestation initiative for some years and am financing crowdfunded loans for businesses to install solar panels in developing countries right now while also leading an ethically conscious lifestyle when it comes to travel, diet, activism and general consumption).


That's a great question so I hope I can provide a little insight to my thinking:

    * You are right, we do need to also focus on reducing emissions and carbon removal is by no means a replacement for reductions;
    * However even if we were to reduce to zero emissions tomorrow, there is still an excess of emissions already present in the atmosphere that needs to be addressed/removed.
    * Another large consideration for myself when thinking about this project was to support as many carbon removal projects as possible now, so they can be mature, cheaper and readily available as we also reduce.
It is my firm belief that carbon removal should and will replace the existing carbon credits based system. If I emit a ton of CO₂ then buy credits that have reduced (although this is a little ambiguous) someone elses emissions, my 1 ton still exists in the atmosphere.

Reducing my own footprint (so it becomes 0.5 tons) then actively removing that unavoidable footprint - or more if I would like to live carbon negative - means I can truly say I have no impact.

I hope this helps but please feel free to ask about anything else or email me directly: ewan (at) carbonremoved (dot com)


I am co-founder of Open Energy Labs (https://openenergylabs.co/)

We teach young people in sub-Saharan Africa how to build off-grid renewable electricity supplies.

600 million people in SSA don't have access to electricity and one of the main barriers to expanding access is a lack of local technical skills.

We are supporting people to build those technical skills and drive access to electricity across the continent.


Plug for [name redacted]! My buddy [name redacted] is killing it!

He's now on a mission to transform the landscape of the city and turn often neglected patches of grass into thriving microecosystems.

[link redacted]

Been an incredibly positive response so far, if anyone is interested in starting something similar we've discussed open sourcing it so others can do in their own city.


I have always thought of a service like this one but it wouldn't be sustainable where I live due to lack of access to water if it grows. Centralized farming is arguably better suited given existing micro farms and outdated tooling.

But, this is a neat idea. I hope this grows big.


Great idea! I've just recently setup a veggie patch, I can't believe I used to pay for my greens.

From the home page "Between 1989 and 2005, the price of fruits and vegetables in the US increased by 75 percent." Is that corrected for inflation?


I'm one of the co-founder of Digicoop, a worker cooperative based in France. We develop Kantree, a work management platform as SaaS or on-prem solution.

We are a small team, all employees are associates and we are remote first. New employees must become associate after 1 year.

The hardest part for us is funding as no investors are interested in worker coops.

We had quite a few hurdles on the way and the startup scene mostly rejects outliers like us as we have no true funding story to tell. But we really believe in this model and fight hard to keep going.

We have written about our company on kantree's blog if you want more details.


I always wanted to start a coop, but never found anyone who knew how. I am interested in your product and pinged you on your website.


Are you a developer? I'm also wanting to start a coop. Something with maybe our own SaaS that has MRR but also does agency work for companies. If you or anyone else seeing this wants to team up let me know.


I donate the money I make from my side project apps to climate charities. The amount of money I was making was too small to motivate me for purely financial reasons, but as a means to help the environment it adds an additional source of motivation for me to iterate on them.


Nanocents. Although not complete, it is an attempt to allow micro payments on the internet. It allows you to pay one cent on the internet fairly efficiently - most of the money ends up with the payee. This is not a single site payment thing, you can pay one cent (or more) at any site accepting nanocents.

While this may not seem especially important, it provides a way for responsible sites and services to avoid using AdSense and other intrusive systems that track user.

Tracking provides a way to target users with tailored information. This is the ultimate problem. If I can target you with one message and someone else with an opposing divisive message then I can disrupt social systems, including but not limited democracy itself.

Sole founder and developer desperately seeking help. If you are interested in helping or trying out micro payments go to https://nanocents.com and watch the demo video or send email to

info at nanocents.com

edited for grammar


The second coming of Project Xanadu.


Considering the economic fuck-house as a result of the pandemic , our company has shifted our focus from increasing MRR to helping out anyone and everyone who can benefit from our resume software.

Furthermore, I've started to familiarize myself with the Sustainable Development Goals outlined by the UN - specifically inclusive economic growth as so many people are the edge of economic ruin.

https://rezi.io - we are just a simple resume software that many people love and trust


Hi Jacob,

A couple of questions.

1. I could be mistaken on this, however, the resume template used by your service ("The Rezi Format") appears to be generated with LaTeX. Do you allow your users to download the tex source code?

2. If your service does use LaTeX behind the scenes, where was the original tex source code for "The Rezi Format" template acquired?

3. A resume will typically contain a lot of high value user data. What steps does your service take to keep this data secure from you, your employees, or any future buyers?

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions.


Apart from other founders chiming in here, there indeed are "impact tech" (buzzword warning) startup incubators and accelerators out there. https://hatchcolab.ch, https://opentech.fund, https://fongit.ch, https://nlnet.nl/foundation/ are a few that come to mind.

Here's a blog post that lists some VCs actively investing in impact tech: https://medium.com/@IFI/the-what-why-who-and-how-of-impact-t...


I'm the co-founder of Oswald Labs (https://oswaldlabs.com), an accessibility technology company that builds products for people with disabilities.

For example, we built Augmenta11y, an AR reading app for children with dyslexia, that makes reading 20% faster for them. We even published a research paper in the IEEE about it: https://oswaldlabs.com/research/publications/dyslexia-augmen....

Our business model is B2B SaaS for our web accessibility/customization plugin that adds features like dyslexia-friendly reading mode to websites. We charge a monthly fee for the plugin after a free plan for websites with less than 10k pageviews per month.

Not that it means much, but we were one of the youngest founders in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2018 list as "Social Entrepreneurs", so you can find many other companies focused on impact there: https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2020/social-entrepreneurs....


YC has a nonprofit programs :

List of the YC non-profits:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_VuERKGdeFU_VnsJpybvpwuF...

see more:

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4k-what-y-combinator-loo...


They do, but a lot of the social good companies are not actually non-profits but more like low-profit/high-impact, or B-corp style. In fact a few states have Benefit Corp/Social Purpose Company LLC-like structures.

So it puts you in a somewhat weird spot since you will never be potentially worth a billion dollars (which is the guideline for the for-profit track of YC) nor are you a pure non-profit.

It'd be cool if they added such a track or loosened the non-profit restrictions so it's not necessarily a 501c3 structure.


This is perfect, thank you!


I'm not a social entepreneur myself, but I work for a social enterprise that offers two products:

- An app (https://badges.giki.earth) that lets you scan barcodes for products in UK supermarkets and lets you see various badges we award: if it's organic, uses sustainable palm oil, vegan, and so on — to help people shop more ethically and sustainably.

- A UK-based climate change lifestyle tracker / behaviour "nudge" website (https://zero.giki.earth) - a "green FitBit for your lifestyle". You sign up, calculate your carbon footprint based on your lifestyle, and then commit to taking steps to reducing it. We also offer this to businesses and other organisations to encourage them to become more sustainable.

(Aside: Giki stands for "Get Informed, Know your Impact")

Any questions? I can be reached at the email in my profile or at matthew.heath@giki.co.uk :-)


I am Xavier, Mathematical Artist. And we are currently running a campaign called “Think OMNI” to introduce the entire US (for now) to a form of thinking that I call Omnidisciplinary Thinking. This form of thinking entails intuitively decomposing ideas into their root forms in order to efficiently use knowledge across, within, and between boundaries, disciplines, and industries. In essence, the boundaries that we put around our thoughts and ideas are useful tools yet we forget that such boundaries do not truly exist.

Think OMNI aims to show people how to use Omnidisciplinary Thinking pragmatically today! in order to provide solutions in three areas: personal, interpersonal, social.

Personal: Powerfully reason by analogy to better understand the world and one’s true capabilities

Interpersonal: Engage with Root of discussions to better communicate with others, especially when their views seem in opposition to one’s own. By decomposing to the Root and reconstructing, we can avoid rhetorical blocks and have difficult conversations.

Social: at this point, this is two-pronged. One is to show companies how to decompose talent because Keyword Bingo doesn’t work when entire industries need to shift into others. Furthermore, training efforts need to build on whatever is already there with a person’s skills rather than start from scratch.

At its most pragmatic, an Omnidisciplinary Thinker should be able to leverage every single piece of knowledge and experiences that one possesses to figure out how to meet basic needs in order to build Breathing Room to pursue other things. In general, it will allow for people to seamlessly blend insights across all disciplines. And the ultimate Omnidisciplinary minds will be able to powerfully and accurately draw insights from incredibly disparate subjects for pragmatic outcomes. (Imagine reasoning about medicine in terms of painting.)

Leading into the US election, the intent is that people of all social-political backgrounds, ages, etc. can use this to have the difficult discussions that we were not able to and still are not able to have with one another today. As a response to COVID, this tool must help employers and job seekers be more fluid with what a person’s skills actually are and what a role entails. In the longer term, this is expected to be a powerful thought tool to be leveraged by people around the world.

I may be contacted at [email address redacted].


Just visited mathis.art. My apologies for the bluntness but the general impression it gives off is a project by an eco-centric person making bold claims about things. You speak a great sense of pragmatism but I don’t see anything pragmatic about the campaign, both in your HN post and on the website. Also I don’t see anything mathematical or remotely art.

Please don’t get me wrong. What you are doing sounds interesting. Here is just my 2c and I hope you it find useful. Looking forwards to seeing your progress. You are in my watch list now =)


Thank you for the feedback. The post I made here is the focus for now. This was the site as it was a few years ago when I was experimenting with the idea and the question “Should an artist be egotistical?” After all, is such a site about exploring one’s self? Regardless, the site is now about how we all can think moving forward, so it is no longer an individual expression of myself.

I am currently working on a complete redesign as we speak. The only reason I even mentioned it here was the timeliness of the General Post. The site as it is needs to at least have the information I posted here, which it does not. Please consider it Under Construction. It currently is not related to the campaign at all.

Also, a thought experiment for you to ponder: Must art leave an artifact? Who made that restriction? If an artifact and a conversation have the same effects on the world, is one more artful than the other? Is the creator/instigator of a response more worthy when there is a tangible thing?

These sorts of questions are not what “Think OMNI” is about, though. Think OMNI is about eating, raising a family, engaging with neighbors. Pondering art is for after Breathing Room has been developed.


Currently looking for 3D visualizers to turn complex shapes into others. Grassroots at the moment, so would need volunteers.


I've worked in technology my whole professional life, founded startup companies and most recently run a London based digital agency. About 3 years ago I started asking myself if this whole Internet project that I've been a part of for so long is a net positive or a net negative in terms of our quality of life. I didn't like the answers I was giving myself and so decided to devote my time to digital activism.

In 2018 I co-founded https://YourDigitalRights.org, a free and open source service which helps you regain control of your online privacy by instructing organizations to send you a copy of, or delete the personal information that they have on you. The service automates the process of filing data access and deletion (right to be forgotten) requests.

We have a few other projects in the pipeline. We're now in the process of registering as a charitable organization in the UK, although that has proven far more difficult then we expected (our initial application was rejected on the grounds that privacy is not a right and therefore if that's what we're promoting it is a political cause, which is not permitted for a charity).

I also moved with my family to the countryside in Italy where together with my wife and some friends we're starting an alternative school: https://shadesofgreen.school/

Here's a recent interview I gave if you'd like to read more: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/yoav-aviram/

Feel free to email me through the address at https://YourDigitalRights.org if you'd like to chat.


Hi! I'm a co-founder of Change [1]. CHANGE connects our network of today's most resonant nonprofits with brands to power donation rewards.

With consumer activism on the rise, our rewards system allows brands to be at the forefront of social responsibility while actively engaging the most coveted demographic. 59% of Change users consistently share branded content with their online following after redeeming their rewards. On average, every $6.67 in donated rewards results in one unique user sharing branded content on their Instagram story - $36 less than the average payment for nano influencers.

We quit our jobs 6 months ago during COVID-19 to start this. Check out our mobile app [2]. Change is looking to grow its network! If there are any nonprofits or brands you would like to see on Change, let us know! We would love to reach out or be introduced! Let me know if you are interested in learning more

[1] www.getchange.io [2] Mobile app: www.link.getchange.io/app


I don't identify myself as a social entrepreneur but we built Cloudron around 2014 for personal reasons. When Google Reader shut down, we realized the importance of self-hosting and data ownership. Initially, we started writing our own apps but mid-way recognized that there is already a plethora of self-hostable (especially opensource) software out there. It's just that those apps are really hard to deploy. So, we now make a smart server platform that you can install on any cloud server or home server and you can easily install and maintain those apps.

Over time, we had to make many decisions around outside investment, salaries and target audience. We make choices based on whether it has social impact and whether our day to day work solves problems that we personally care about and for other privacy minded people like us. For example, we did not pursue outside investment (despite offers) and decided to retain 100% ownership of the company. We felt taking funding will make us focus on large enterprises and the product will take a different direction (k8s anyone?), quite far from any social impact. Investors, who we met, seemed to care more about 100x growth than our cause and some even laughed at the idea - "who wants to selfhost email?".

Same for salaries, we took a heavy pay cut for the initial 2-3 years just to to get product going along (and so many pivots). What kept us going is that we felt there is a social aspect to the product and if we don't do this nobody will. With a bit of luck, today we are profitable and can pay ourselves decent salary now (fwiw, I am based in bay area).

Just wanted to share our story, I don't know if it's relevant to what you are asking :) Ultimately, we want normal people and businesses to self-host and have complete control over their data (I wish we had the resources to make a hardware appliance that sits alongside the router). I understand I am not curing cancer or solving world hunger, but I want to do my bit moving the privacy needle :) !


I have used cloudrun before when I didn't have much technical knowledge.

It is awesome. You might also be interested in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24171800


Cloudron is awesome, thanks!


I created Treets ( https://treets.org ), a basic shop that currently plants 5 trees in areas of need around the world for every item sold. The challenge was finding the right partners also focused on sustainability from the fabric to the continued maintenance and oversight of trees.

The issue I saw was many companies were claiming to be eco-conscious with planting trees but behind the scenes their product was harmful and their tree planting was merely donating ~$1 from $70+ items. Currently Treets continues to plant more trees than it costs to operate and I'll continue to run it so long as that holds true.


Ecosia (https://www.ecosia.org/) is a search engine based in Germany which spends most of its profits in reforestation efforts by collaborating with local non-profit organizations. They also publish their monthly financial reports here: https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planti...

Disclaimer: Not related to them in any way but recently came to know about them when they hit the 100 million count of trees planted.


I built the community at https://collective.energy to help environmental entrepreneurs have a platform to find an audience, get feedback, and collaborate!


It looks interesting - but...

The first thing i did was hit the search button to see if the site could help with my own projects - being asked to login when I tried was pretty jarring.

If I ran across this in the wild, that behavior would probably be enough to leave without bookmarking.


Hey HugeAcumen, that is great feedback. I've now changed the permissions to allow guests to be able to search. Check it out again and feel free to join us if you'd like :)


That's great, thanks :)


Immensely cool Eric and very valuable. I’ll be checking in.


My YC-Alum cofounder and I just launched Smiiles.com to provide the highest quality masks to the homeless.

We started when a friend asked if we could help get masks to homeless in LA, and our friends from TOMs and Bombas inspired us to use the 1 for 1 model.

We are currently in a friends and family launch and in talks for retail distribution.

Our first goal is to provide 300,000 masks a month to LA county.

My HN friends can visit to order (3 packs = free shipping): Http://Smiiles.com/anthony

Also check us out on IG @givesmiiles

- Partners include LA County Department of Health, Flowspace, Flexport and Webflow.


[The parser of HN does not like Http with a capital H. Edit your comment to change it to an h so it become clickable.]


Doh! I missed the edit deadline...

But here it is: http://smiiles.com/anthony


Consider the social impact of the way digital marketing works today: it is completely based on surveillance. This creates mistrust and it is the reason conversion rates are so small. Makes people feel used.

Based on my research while doing my postgrad at Cambridge, I figured out a way to scale empathy: no need for personal data, no need for intrusive technologies, no need for excessive details.

Today we work on this social impact if you will: make people feel understood.


> my research while doing my postgrad at Cambridge, I figured out a way to scale empathy: no need for personal data, no need for intrusive technologies, no need for excessive details.

How??


My research was around "behavioural causality." The simple way to put it is: any human behaviour can be explained by a core motivation (4 of them) and driving emotion (8 of them). Just as all the music is made with just a handful of notes, the same way no matter how complex a behaviour, it's just a combination of these 2 factors. Of course it's a bit more complicated, but that's the gist of it.

Now, let's say you want to use this for advertising: if you know the equation behind the decision to adopt a product, then you can put in you ad the right copy (i.e. stimuli for the required emotion). People who are ready to switch will feel understood.

Happy to share more if it's relevant to you.


With the main goal of surveillance free advertising? Interesting


Makes sense if you think about it: no matter how much data I have on you, I don't actually know you. I'm just a creep and the ads I point toward you make you feel creepy.

In my approach, I understand what makes people buy my product so I look for behaviour patterns that are similar but completely isolated from identities. Does this make sense?


Very related: Founders Pledge

Founders Pledge is a charitable initiative, where entrepreneurs make a commitment to donate at least 2% of their personal proceeds to charity when they sell their business. Inspired by effective altruism, the mission of Founders Pledge is to "empower entrepreneurs to do immense good"

https://founderspledge.com/


I'm trying to help people host their own websites instead of trusting their social data to big tech. It started as an open source blogging system, but I think it takes a hosted option to be sufficiently accessible. Still a very new project: https://simpleblogs.org/


Major problem is support and management. Hosting can be automated to a degree and has been by many projects. Some open source software charge one time setup fee for their automated DO/scaleway/cloud install button.


Social entrepreneur here. Background: https://www.sunnyirrigation.com

I just feel the premise of the question begs a little bit of helpful correction. Social entrepreneurs don't necessarily place social impact above profit. (Rather the social impact is extraordinarily hard to quantify). But true that S-E's do weigh the value of social-impact vis-a-vis profit. I would argue though they do so mostly in their intentionality compared with the alternatives they could have otherwise embarked on when they decided to form a social impact venture in the first place.

I began writing on some of the philosophy speaking to the impact-profit distinction which is very often framed as a dichotomy. If there's interest I'll finish and post it.


A company called xocial would fit the bill. They're a registered B-Corporation. From their FAQ:

xocial is a team of do-gooders (okay, okay, developers, strategists and investors) who want to use technology to make us better parents, friends, coworkers, bosses, businesses and citizens. Instead of measuring our popularity, xocial measures our positive social impact. The fact that we’re measuring it means we can compete with each other to see who can do the most good—which is where our idea for competitive kindness came from.

https://www.xocial.com/faqs https://app.xocial.com/


One of the great joys of making a profit has been giving to causes and needs that tug on my heart strings. Please help me understand the logic of how operating a business at a loss (eschewing profits) has a greater impact than having money to put towards said impact.

Ex. Bill Gates


A ‘not-for-profit’ does not mean it doesn’t make a profit. It means that profits generated are used to further the purpose of the organisation and not, for example, for shareholder enrichment. A loss-making organisation could only be sustainable if it was receiving grants or donations, in which case it is more likely to be a charity than NFP.


OP said “social entrepreneur” placing “social impact over profit”.

That’s not a charity it’s a weak business.


Meaning that social impact is prioritised over profit. There’s still no constraint on making profit, and there is the same potential to be financially successful.

Many, if not most, businesses aim to make profit regardless of their social impacts — they’ve probably never even thought about what they are. It’s easy to say that employing people and giving them a salary is the most useful social impact a business can (or should) have, but when you factor in negative externalities that may not be true.

A social entrepreneur actively aims to make a positive social impact. It’s not about it being a weak business or a charity.


Seedspot based in Phoenix (https://seedspot.org) is an incubator that helps a whole bunch of social ventures every year. The few demo days i attended had rather amazing ventures present.


Habe a look at the World Summit Award (WSA) and its sister project the European Youth Award (EYA) - now known as WSA Young Innovators. There are a lot of cool projects going on!

* https://wsa-global.org/ * https://eu-youthaward.org/ * https://wsa-global.org/wsa_categories/wsa-young-innovators/


The top level replies here are interesting, I think, for the HN crowd.

There’s some great examples of social good - helping homelessness, poor countries, the starving, the environment etc.

I don’t see anything though related to digital human rights and fixing the surveillence marketing & surveilance state activites that have overcome the web. As a tech crowd i find that very intriguing.

If anyone has examples of what they’re doing in this space I’d like to hear it?

I’m thinking of things like Solid, Matrix, Sovrin, and so on... this area seems to be growing rapidly and it interests me alot


About digital rights and data ownership, I wrote about my company here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24170790


One of these already commented here: Mullvad - their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24169684

I myself started out my (now our) privacy business a little different: When Snowden revealed the surveillance machinery around the world in 2013, I got thinking about how we as a society as a whole could ever withstand such a exploitive surveillance. You'll never win against a Nation/State actor 1-on-1 head on, but evading the dragnet of nations and of surveillance capitalism is possible. BUT, this requires a minimum of technical knowledge, which many do not have.

That is the barrier we want to remove. That is our social purpose.

This has led to an amazing journey, eventually expanding to three Co-Founders and our first couple employees. The founders hold 100% of the company on won't give any control away. We still live off of public and private (social impact) funding.

We try to give away as much as we can for free, and selling premium features. Our Application Firewall and Privacy Filter, the Portmaster, is completely free and open source.

The paid add-on is a brand new privacy network, which is somewhat similar to VPN and Tor. It eventually fully removes the need to trust us as a provider.

Check it all out at: https://safing.io/


I'm in the process of stringing together a gsuite type offering with open source packages like nextcloud and wildduck. The plan is to be a cooperative owned by its members (customers and employees), and to let them be the main arbiters of social ends. I'm expecting privacy and the environment to be key concerns from my research so far. Not currently open for signups while I get some design and marketing help from a freelancer and tune some of the account/identity handling.


Yep, and loving every minute of it. I left a SWE career and am focused on growing ImpactUpgrade.com, where we solely serve nonprofits with all things digital and operations. We're primarily working with some larger organizations that tackle child sex trafficking. Hiring like hotcakes -- would love to chat with anyone interested in working with us.

Happy to dive into detail on the specifics, for profit for good vs nonprofit, the downsides of tech volunteering, etc.


I'm working on a project called The People's Devs about doing pro bono dev work for social justice groups or organizations. Currently it's just me helping my art studio build an app to help artists and those struggling to get funding for housing and supplies. Haven't been sure how to scale and get more people, but I'm hoping it'll grow organically over time rather than chasing specific types of devs or organizations.


I'm starting an open collaborative knowledge sharing platform for personalised learning that would be registered as a non profit if things go well. First release on the way: https://sci-map.org/ From what I've seen there's really few social projects aiming for an exponential growth, startup style.


I built givecrew, an app to donate with your friends as a team. The goal is to have a larger impact by grouping together your funds, donating together, and making a social long lasting experience.

https://www.givecrew.org/


I develop opensource software, so people don't need to pay for software!

Wouldn't that be a nice world to live in?


I co-founded Raisely, we’re a social enterprise. Impact is baked into our constitution, we report on it before profit, we restrict who can use our SaaS and we’re a bcorp. I wouldn’t call it “riding a wave” or just “talk” - it’s just genuine global citizenship.


I've just checked your site out, I really like that you offer core services for free and then up-sell on marginal services!

I'm curious -- who do you report the impact to, and how?

Is there a framework in how you went about pricing to balance the profit-motive and the impact-motive?


There isn’t much around to govern social enterprises, so we don’t have much of a framework.

We report impact regularly internally (it’s in dashboards the whole team has access to) and through the B-Corp certification we get assessed in detail every few years. Our staff hold us to account, more than our customers or the law.

For us we found a mechanism where benefit and profit are aligned, and I think most good social enterprises have done the same. That’s to say that the more impact we have, the healthier we are on classic business metrics.


Can you tell me a little more about the mechanism you found? I'm understanding it as your staff holding to you account -- how do these conversations typically go?


Have you taken any investors? If so was the bcorp an issue?


No haven’t raised yet (haven’t needed to), but have spoken to VCs. Being a bcorp hasn’t ever been mentioned as an issue.


Literally doing capitalism 2.0. We make it easy to use your shareholder rights to push for change among the companies and funds you invest in.

For example: https://www.yourstake.org/petition/disclose-corporate-politi...


Bill Gates and Elon Musk are two of the best examples of effective social entrepreneurship.

Bill Gates made the money and then spent it socially on vaccine research, reducing disease, improving education, etc.

Elon Musk's efforts are more directly social-entrepreneurial. He's helping to move the entire world away from gas powered vehicles (Tesla/Solar City), reducing urban congestion and improving rural life (SpaceX/Starlink), and trying to back up civilization on other planetary bodies (SpaceX).

I think the idea of "social entrepreneurship" is plagued by the problem of "serving two masters" when you really need focus to be successful.

Elon Musk clearly is clearly doing social entrepreneurship, but in practice that just means running successful (and relatively traditional) capitalist enterprises. Gates was even more conventional with his path. Both are doing a lot more good than most people who call themselves social entrepreneurs.


Would the founder of vegan restaurant be considered a social entrepreneur? As by growing their business, more people will consume non meat-based food, and in fine help reduce climate change.

Defining the boundaries of social entrepreneurship would require a whole separate thread.


A calculation of effectiveness should contain not just an assessment of magnitude but also of scalability.

Most people can't become Bill Gates or Elon Musk. There's not enough births of the computing age, or births of online banking to go around. There's a lot of people seeking to do social good within the confines of capitalism.

So while most (all?) techniques may be less impactful than Gates and Musk, we shouldn't hold back people trying to find other strategies (dare I call them entrepreneurs) by confining them to being ruthless capitalists who later grow benevolent or build Wayne Industrieses.


I used to work at https://maishameds.org/ which is working on pharmaceutical distribution in East Africa.


Your ask is pretty ambiguous. What specific questions do you have?


You're right, that's my bad. The thinking I had in mind when making the post is that entrepreneurship is difficult enough and the desire to make social impact introduces a sometimes competing demand.

I wanted to get some perspective on what this is like and if there were any role models out there to study as I am keen on going down this road!


I think it’s certainly an extra thing to consider and just focusing on profit is maybe easier in the short term, but I think profit without purpose quickly leads a company directionless and staff demoralised.


Social impact may be more sustainable. Think about a parasite that kills its host vs two organisms that exists in a symbiotic relationship.


A few years ago, I gave up a "successful" career as a hat-wearer and started minimizing my upkeep time and spending.

I am now 3000+ commits into a project I enjoy writing.


Yes, we work with farmers in India - we teach them organic and natural farming and we find ways to sell their produce to customers in the cities. www.unifield.in


That's neat. I don't have experience with farms/agriculture so pardon my ignorance.

Are there existing centralized communication systems to know which farmers are growing which crop in a state or country at what rate?

Centralized and vertical farming doesn't work with small farmers and there are too many of them but it's hard to get them to lease the land and start your own hub afaik.

With ground water depletion, lack of storage facilities, distribution channels, capital and good tooling. It's a hard problem.

Would it help/work to have a federal level planning system that farmers can use to decide which crops to grow and how. Get support through a hedge fund and be able to reuse tools.


We work with farmers in India. There is data on what is being grown in various areas but not fine grained enough or updated often enough for our purposes.

If you are in the US the reality of farming is very different there vs-a-vie the situation in India.


I live in India.

> There is data on what is being grown in various areas but not fine grained enough or updated often enough for our purposes.

Right? Do you think farmers would self report that data in exchange of getting real time data from other farms? Would they care about recommendation on what to grow and pricing?

There are lot of groups for techies online and self reporting channels but I haven't found any good ones for farmers in india. Can you list them for me if you know about them?

I would love to talk more. Email is in the profile.


It would be very difficult to get farmers to self-report anything unless what they get in return is quite tangible. I am not familiar with any network/system that does this effectively in India and at scale.


I've started giving cash to poor/needy within my vicinity; I believe it's the easiest/efficient way to help poor families;


And yesterday I donated to https://donate.wikimedia.org


Loop you in for what purpose? Can you share more?


The thinking I had in mind when making the post is that entrepreneurship is difficult enough and the desire to make social impact introduces a sometimes competing demand.

I wanted to get some perspective on what this is like and if there were any role models out there to study as I am keen on going down this road!


my friend started this initiative to help give back knowledge to community on specific categories like gardening, hiking etc He brings experts to give hour long interactive webinars, he has slapped together a quick wordpress site https://enlightenedsapiens.com/


I feel like you should first try to become self-sustainable just to be able to support your idea and team.


I work over at the non-profit Internet Archive running their Open Library. There are a lot of people in the space, applying their entrepreneurial affinities towards public good. I spent ~5 years doing startups before joining the Internet Archive.

Been here for ~5 years.

There's pretty high leverage for impact. It's very fun and satisfying work. Big community of passionate, smart people who care.

This can be true... and at the same time, I'd say there hasn't been a day which has gone by where I haven't felt impostor syndrome as I'm forced to compare my work against the aggressive forward progress achieved by well funded and staffed for-profit organizations.

One of the reasons talent steers clear of non-profits is circumstantial. VCs (who have a vested interest in smart people starting companies or joining their portfolio companies) encourage smart people to do startups. Makes sense, not bad advice.

But this also results in a strange form of dissonance where I'm perfectly certain millions of people could do better work (better design, engineering, and PM'ing) than I'm doing, and yet in the past 5 years, no one has come along and done it.

I think it's in part this self fulfilling prophecy why more, talented people don't try the non-profit path. You likely won't earn stock and may not save up enough to buy an Bay Area house.

1. The impact at non-profits can be extraordinarily high.

For years, I was the only PM / SWE / ops / dir of openlibrary.org responsible for ~3M+ patrons. We were enabling millions of meaningful book borrows for patrons and students. I've been able to independently drive large programs forward, shape partnerships, and am afforded a massive amount of trust and agency w/o having to escalate through a chain of 20 directors.

2. Many non-profit orgs (Wikimedia, Internet Archive, Mozilla, EFF, et al) offer competitive salaries

(I guess SF is a magical place) I'm still able to earn (sans stock) w/ a competitive 6-figure salary.

3. Non-profits can offer opportunities for self-directed personal growth

As someone who considers themselves an early stage "startup person", I've been able to (at my discretion) participate in community organization (50+ contributors), project planning & management, design, devops, software engineering, program creation, and partnerships (I've helped lead a design partnership with the Tradecrafted Group & Rutger's University). I've mentored 3 interns and have had ample opportunities to participate in public speaking.

4. Flexibility

I work remotely with a diverse group of people from all over the world (Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Amsterdam, India, Italy, etc) :)

5. The team & mission

The people I work with care so much.

Caveats: Non-profits are like startups in another way; I've found myself perpetually having to move quickly and balance time constraints (knowing even if I build something people love, the "rocket fuel" or funding is seldom available to scale up the team we need). This also means (at least for Internet Archive) it can be hard to specialize and I don't always get to build the sexiest solutions with the latest tech.


You mean like Amazon that doesn't make a profit, and passes on their vast, amazing operational efficiency basically for free?

Or Walmart that makes very thin margins and uses their power to force profits out of the value chain (they sit down with suppliers and require them to reduce margin) and has a policy of keeping margins extremely low themselves, thereby creating massive surpluses and helping people with little financial means more than any other program?

People focus so much in 'profit' when that's usually a narrow slice of what's going on.

When people are paying you for stuff or services, most of what is happening is value creation of some kind.

If people are not willing to pay you, it might be a sign that what you are doing is not useful to them.

The amount of 'surplus' generated for the customer is usually not even measured, particularly for consumers (it's called 'consumer surplus' and it's their version of profit).

If you are creating a ton of consumer surplus, then worrying about your narrow slice of profit doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

If you're an NGO not creating a ton of consumer surplus then you are a value destroyer not a value creator and you're basically burning money, truly wasteful. (I'm not saying NGOs are that, but they can be).

There's no such thing as 'Capitalism 2.0' - build a company, create surpluses, be a good actor, and take some margin as profit, or not, whatever you want, it's a side show.


there is no capitalism x.y here nor social just “democratic”(?) politics. i.e. you harvest votes, you want as many as possible zombie voters or as many as possible from a specific proffesional/social branch or company (unions anyone?)


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Believe it or not, there is a large, large space between acting socially responsible and wanting money for "an edgy leftist position."

So large. A gulf. Maybe you misread the question?

Out of morbid curiosity - who do you believe is funding the breakup of the nuclear family? Where are you getting this from?

And I'll bet you $10 that you are American - in no other country in the world is "tech companies want to dismantle the nuclear family" a somewhat common belief. Except maybe Saudi Arabia and some other "theocracies".


Sorry if this hurt your feelings. You're one of the good people, doing great work. From reading "How to Win Friends..." I learned the importance to make people feel important. Sorry if I didn't do that in this case. My acumen is smaller. I apologize for any triggering.

I was just poking fun at tech companies, funding not so well thought out positions.

To answer your question, its currently one of the stated goals of BLM.


“Dismantle the nuclear family” ... “currently one of the stated goals of BLM”

This is patent nonsense. Why would you ever believe that’s the goal of any widely supported organization? What happened to Occam’s razor?

The absurdity of this claim inspired me to “do my own research” on the matter.

The notion that this is a “goal” seems to stem from this portion of the “what we believe” page here:

https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

> We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’ so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work. > > We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

Family friendly spaces and supporting each other as extended families are hardly “dismantling the nuclear family”.


...please don't feed the trolls. Flag, downvote, and move on.


Similarly, please don't create accounts just to post things like this.


I don't see the harm. What am I missing? Genuinely not trolling you here.


From the guidelines:

> "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I am walking the talk...

Google this: Welcome to XClave by Markus Allen


This appears to be a pyramid scheme...


You can ask literally anyone involved in the music industry...


no

but if i’m going to start a business the best way to make an impact is to create a business model that can sustainably provide a true living wage plus benefits for all employees. that would be my “social impact”.


I am walking the talk - impact over profits.

Google this: Welcome to XClave by Markus Allen


The way that you know that you're making a social impact or benefiting society then you're making money. Social benefit and making profits are the same thing.

There are exceptions of course, like if you made money by cheating via violence or because you got the government to grant you special privileges. Otherwise, if you're playing by the rules then your profit is the only objective, rational way to reason about your social impact. The more profit you make, the greater that you know your impact has been.


I strongly disagree with your statement that profit is the only objectective, rational measure of social impact.

It would be great if the balance of human and environmental well-being produced by an organization could be captured as such, but I feel it is often much more complicated.

It is clear that a poor child has a lower ability to pay for goods and services than a rich child. Does this mean that goods and services sold to the rich one with a hefty profit margin are more "beneficial to society" than when sold to the poor one at cost?


First, those are two different things. The first is a business selling a product for profit, the second is a charity: giving or subsidising food to a kid.

It's impossible to know how much benefit anyone gets from food. Maybe the rich kid barely notices the food because he lives in abundance, maybe it's his favourite food, maybe the poor kid is starving and desperate, maybe he's overweight and the food is doing him harm, maybe it's the rich kid's favourite food but his brain reacts less favourably to that than the other kid when eating his least favoured food.

The only thing that can be reasoned about any of the above was that rich kid's parents wanted to pay more money for the food than what the stuff going into it cost. The food producer created something more valuable than what he started with. That is the only conclusion that you can objectively reason about from the above.


It’s maybe not quite so simple and you need to keep an eye on externalities. I’d adjust your formula, somewhat crudely, into:

Social benefit = profit - externalities.

Sadly, most businesses on that construction are negative social benefit.

And that’s down to our bawbag accounting system.


That's pretty absurd. You just said that most companies are on net a burden on our society.

Let me check. Yep, can confirm that we do not live in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

If what you said were true, we would probably not live in a world where most people spend <5% of their day hunting/gathering food, transportation is ubiquitous and universally available, lifespans are unnaturally long, media and entertainment is ubiquitous and caters to every imaginable taste.... I could go on.

Further, given the absensce of the hellscape, if your assertion were true, the balance of benefit to provide our world—in which such a wide range of human wants or needs are easily satisfied—would have to come from a very small number of super companies that are providing the overwhelming surplus of benefits that make our world what it is. I feel that one or few companies that miraculously provides all value to humanity and is our great salvation would probably be a household name... And I'm pretty sure it's not Apple or Telsa.


you’re right. We don’t live in a hellscape yet. But slow drawdown of environmental capital could bring this about. Climate change is the foremost example of this.


Using your definition any kind of charity or volunteer work provide no benefit to society. This sounds pretty absurd, so either you didn't mean it this way and you need to restate your view more clearly, or you did mean it -- in which case this is a pretty bold statement which requires a more convincing explanation than the one you've given.


Quick clarifying question: are you saying this earnestly, or as satire?


HN doesn't really do satire and its pool of inhumane thinking is endless.


This is an interesting perspective, that I sometimes have as well.

But you did miss the important nuance of the externalities as another post also comments.

And you did list subsidies, but some subsidies are hard to notice.

Cars, for example, are heavily subsidised (think of road maintenance+the rent of all that space) and cause negative externalities (noise, pollution and congestion).

So it is more than possible to make a profit and not be socially beneficial (I think that cars are a good example, but we can disagree on that, they stand mostly as an example of subsidies and externalities, the balance of good and harm is harder to access).


What do you think about tobacco companies? Or payday lenders?

I understand some would do something highly profitable but morally questionable and then donate the profits to a more socially productive firm. Is that what you are thinking? The end justifies the means?


Regarding Tobacco: they're providing a product that people want to consume. I'm classifying fraud with violence. So if a tobacco company lies, pretending that their products are healthy or whatever, that's evil. But a rational human can decide that they want to indulge in something now at the cost of possible consequences in the future. That you or others may not have such a strong time preference, i.e. choose current indulgences at a higher future cost, is no reason to project your values on others or to say that selling tobacco is not providing that consumer the benefit of enjoying a nicotine hit.

Not 100% familiar with payday lenders, but I'm assuming short term, very high interest rate loans. In principle access to credit is useful to people to meet immediate needs. It is the case for any loan that saving up, rather than spending now and incurring the cost of interest would be cheaper. Lending people money lets them enjoy houses, cars, or other trinkets earlier than they could otherwise obtain them. The added benefit comes at the cost of paying interest. If someone does that over shorter timeframes at higher interest doesn't change the value that lending brings.

What we can say rationally about the above is that consumers chose to indulge in the above services, that they gave up their valuable cash in exchange for the benefits that the above services brought them.


Would you equate satisfying the (real or perceived) needs of individuals with social benefit? Are there situations where you could view the profit-generating satisfaction of one person's needs as a net negative to the sum of all individuals' needs?


Both examples feature large long-term negative externalities that are usually picked up in one way or another by the taxpayer.


Here the fault is not the buyer or seller but the government. If you didn't financially penalise the smoker for smoking, he would have a disincentive to smoke. However, the government might decide to subsidise healthcare, thereby taking away the financial penalty of smoking. The government now takes away the financial burden of smoking and encourages people to smoke. I don't think people should smoke, which is why I would object to the government subsidising it.

If people want to indulge their very immediate needs at the future cost to their hip-pocket or health that's Thier indulgence and is what they rationally decided will make them happy. I think it's immoral to take money from taxpayers to subsidise behaviour that has harmful long-term effects.


As a part-time trader, my social impact has no relationship whatsoever with my profits.


Not true. Your trading provides a secondary market for companies. It encourages people to create new companies to later sell to investors.

Further, you get rewarded to the degree that you correctly speculate on the future prices of stocks (or whatever you trade) and penalised when you get it wrong. That tends to bring future prices back in time (that is, speculation causes the price of something to reflect today what it otherwise would have been in the future). That's really important because it causes capital to be more accurately alloted to ventures that will be creating value in the future and away from those that will create less value or be destructive of value in the future.


Stock trading is at an all-time high. Do you think more companies are being created or fewer?




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