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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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...
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.
The first prototype house should be done this year!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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...
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....
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...
- 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 :-)
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].
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.
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
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 :) !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Ex. Bill Gates
* https://wsa-global.org/ * https://eu-youthaward.org/ * https://wsa-global.org/wsa_categories/wsa-young-innovators/
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
Happy to dive into detail on the specifics, for profit for good vs nonprofit, the downsides of tech volunteering, etc.
Wouldn't that be a nice world to live in?
For example: https://www.yourstake.org/petition/disclose-corporate-politi...
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.
I am now 3000+ commits into a project I enjoy writing.
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.
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.
Google this: Welcome to XClave by Markus Allen
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”.
Google this: Welcome to XClave by Markus Allen
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.