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Comment by joelg | Hacker News Reader

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joelg

> At some point a company needs to make money

:-/

OpenAI started as a non-profit.

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Non-profit does not mean “spends money in perpetuity with no revenue.”

that's not what happened with OpenAI though. They're not a non-profit anymore, they changed to a "controlled profit" (lol) model.

I didn't know this was even possible/legal. Start as a non-profit for all the tax advantages and convert to for-profit once you've got a saleable product? Maybe startups should start doing this

What's the point? If your business doesn't turn a profit then you don't owe business income taxes anyways. Most businesses take several years to reach profitability.

I thought it was capped profit not controlled.

"OpenAI is governed by the board of OpenAI Nonprofit, which consists of OpenAI LP employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & CTO), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Holden Karnofsky, Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis, and Tasha McCauley."

https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/

The NFL is also managed by a non-profit. Just because you're managed by a non-profit doesn't mean your company is also a non-profit.

The NFL is a (nonprofit) trade association for NFL team companies.

Yes, but the computing they are trying to do is expensive, so it makes sense to then try and get some self-sustaining revenue by leveraging their research into a software service. I must admit I don't know about their current status of funding from large companies etc, but I do think it makes sense to try and make a bit of their own money to be more independent.

Non-profit doesn't mean zero revenue.

The Girl Scouts are a non-profit yet they don't give their cookies away for free.

Good point, but their name does not imply that their cookies are free.

Girl Scouts USA has been a textbook example for decades now of an institution that misuses non-profit status for financial gain.

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