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Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#21

Post by GreeniFi »

daniel-s wrote: post #13

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 you…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#23

Post by tommaitland »

elliekelly wrote: post #11
tommaitland wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#24

Post by anandchowdhary »

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....

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#25

Post by aaronharnly »

daniel-s wrote: post #13

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 you…

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

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#27

Post by mattharney »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#28

Post by jacob_rezi »

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

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#30

Post by bjelkeman-again »

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.

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