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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?

#251

Post by songzme »

Avtomatk wrote: post #249
songzme wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

#252

Post by kisamoto »

chispamed wrote: post #244
kisamoto wrote: post #64

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'r…

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 carbo…

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)

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

#254

Post by raybb »

AlexMuir wrote: post #10

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,…

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!

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

#255

Post by gremlinsinc »

songzme wrote: post #123
gibolt wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#256

Post by gremlinsinc »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #201
emixam wrote: post #126

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…

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.

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

#257

Post by querez »

kfreds wrote: post #78
LMYahooTFY wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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

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

#258

Post by peridotoak »

kfreds wrote: post #59

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…

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?

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

#259

Post by _oliverking »

tommaitland wrote: post #20
peridotoak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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

#260

Post by GreeniFi »

daniel-s wrote: post #61
GreeniFi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

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.
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