Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?
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!
264 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadI 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 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'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?
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
Everyone loves accountability until it’s applied to them!
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'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!
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.
Social benefit = profit - externalities.
Sadly, most businesses on that construction are negative social benefit.
And that’s down to our bawbag accounting system.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
The first prototype house should be done this year!
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.
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.
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!
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.]
Wow. Just mind blowing. So much power in those few words. The best quote i have come across in probably a decade.
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.
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’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.
How are you looking to monetize the platform? Would you mind talking things over with a potential competitor?
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.
The only people making more than 300,000 are their 4 directors.
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.
Oh, come on, that was one of the few places I semi-idealize as ethical and "clean".
Humans will be humans I guess...
Granted, I didn't talk to this executive, but I feel somewhat comfortable hypothesizing this due to what I know of this area.
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
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".
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.
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”.
> "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
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....
Google this: Welcome to XClave by Markus Allen
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.
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
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.
Google this: Welcome to XClave by Markus Allen
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.
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.
Ex. Bill Gates
That’s not a charity it’s a weak business.
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.
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”.
Happy to dive into detail on the specifics, for profit for good vs nonprofit, the downsides of tech volunteering, etc.
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.
My HN friends can visit to order (3 packs = free shipping): Smiiles.com/anthony
Also check us out in IG @givesmiiles
- Partners include LA County Department of Health, Flowspace, Flexport and Webflow.
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.
But here it is: http://smiiles.com/anthony