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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.