How could a startup begin to address wealth inequality?
The problem is that most of what it comes down to is luck. Luck in the sense of time and place. People born into a wealthy family or even with two loving parents are lucky and way more likely to be wealthy than those that were born without.
Warren Buffett came of age in the greatest period of prosperity in American history. Bill Gates came of age right at the time that PCs became possible. Bezos was first to market on a new and unproven platform. Zuckerberg got lucky because he was able to get started when broadband penetration in developing countries was finally starting to get some traction.
No man is an island and teaching success as a skill is just silly in my opinion.
Bill Gates was actually famously asked a version of this question. (What would you do if you were poor with no education and lived in a third world country.) He responded "Buy Chickens".
And the answer is that most wealthy people, when reset to zero, would never be able to regain their wealth. The only way they may have a shot is by exploiting things from their formally wealthy life (e.g. contacts, connections, niche industry knowledge, or an ivy league degree).
The thing is the obsession trait doesn't necessarily scale. If you cloned a billion Gates', that would NOT give us a billion Microsofts. It's not a zero sum game, but pretty close to one. There's only so much room in any given niche.
Another thing, I've been using and following Microsoft for about 3 decades. They didn't do anything special or innovative in my opinion, at least not relative to their size. MS just did smart marketing, acquisitions, pricing, and packaging. MS mostly leveraged monopoly in one category to gain another category: not raw merit. If MS never existed, the world would be the same or even better off: more OS and office-software choice. I have a bit more respect for Steve Jobs: he spotted useful product configurations before any one else (with means). MS just copied/purchased trends after it was obvious they were catching on.
No doubt IBM would have led innovation if not kneecapped by M$.
Opportunity = hard work + luck
We as individuals should strive to learn how to be successful by looking at those who are successful, and many of those qualities are right in front of our faces. Hell just search for "discipline" or "confidence building" on youtube and one can find how to apply the correct qualities within a few hours. Try David Goggins if you don't know what I'm talking about.
For just one example, if you look at the average person's level of financial literacy today, the situation is appallingly bad. So statistically, it's true that you have to be lucky to be financially literate, but that doesn't mean it inherently requires luck to be able to learn these things. It's just not stuff that most people are even aware of, because nobody is teaching them. It's not an unfixable problem.
At the extreme end of the spectrum, yes, it requires a lot of luck to become as rich as Gates or Buffett, but I don't think that's what OP is trying to achieve. Helping everyday people achieve better financial outcomes is a very different goal from trying to break into the top 0.1%, and is much more achievable IMO.
Despite the notion of the "American Dream", in our country, if you are born poor you will most likely stay poor.
In general, the best things that can be done to address inequality from a for-profit perspective is to reduce consumer costs. Now the obvious problem is that if you cut costs by paying your own people less - or by opting to get your business’s goods and services from suppliers that also pay poorly - then you have only moved inequality from one place to another. But if you invent a way to create goods or offer services at a lower cost without having to cut wages - perhaps by being more efficient with energy or input materials - then you can pass some savings along to the consumer while the rest go to the shareholders as profit. Competitors may go out of business, but new corporations and jobs will take their place. For example, almost everybody uses electricity for light; few use candles, and even then it is more of a luxury than a necessity (like a romantic bedroom scene).
Technological innovation, in my opinion, is the only way that a for-profit corporation can make money and reduce inequality.
A start up could do some mental trickery / game theory that benefits poor people. Say a start up takes 10% of every pay check, but buys all your groceries. They invest the difference into your 401k. The person gets groceries and a retirement fund, without having to know about investing.
Obviously this doesn't really make sense, but the idea is that poor people don't have financial knowledge, don't know where/how to save money, don't have the time to cut costs, etc.
Rich people are likely to tell you that work is the most important, because they tend to have a heroic self image.
Isn't the market growth unequally benefit people? Isn't this a fundamental question that everyone should spend some time on?