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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

You can form companies with all kinds of specific purposes, however, if you want to attract investors (or even attract general public investment by being a publicly traded ompany), then don't be surprised if most investors want to invest in companies whose explicit purpose is making money for the investors.

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If you actually want to dedicate your company to a purpose, it should be something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation

Not to burst your bubble, but B corp certs (I know it's slightly different than SPC, but similar concept and related in your wiki.) isn't exclusive nor hard to get. [0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240202-has-b-corp-cer...

Nothing is perfect, but some things are better than the others.

I’d propose a general rule that no social responsibility can survive corporate scaling. As they get larger more people enter who lack the founders’ vision and the system becomes less driven by personal whims and more driven by things that maintain the system. Profit for a corporation is borderline tautological, like homeostasis for a cell. The most you’ll get out of a larger corpo is whatever appearance of responsibility is required to maintain profits with as little action as possible.

Yes the system is broken

What is the broken part? There is a difference between investment and donation, should investors be forced to invest in ventures which don't explicitly promise them financial return on the investment?

The broken part is when the investors sue the company for not making maximal profit possible, ethic be damned. This is exactly where choosing to be a social purpose corporation might help.

> What is the broken part?

"most investors want to invest in companies whose explicit purpose is making money for the investors".

Rational investors should favor companies whose explicit purpose at least resembles a value proposition, which "PROFIT$!" does not.

The unspoken premise here is that profit correlates to value creation, so it may be more rational to allocate resources to people who can generate value regardless of the form it takes (that's kind of Friedman's idea if you dig a layer deeper).

Rational investors should favor companies which prioritize investor interests, rather than companies which intentionally prioritize someone else's interests over investors.

>What is the broken part?

The second law of thermodynamics is always at fault

We're in the complex phase between point A of a low-entropy uniform distribution of densely packed particles with strong gravitation, and point B of a high-entropy uniform distribution of widely spaced particles with almost no gravitation.

The second law is unfortunately taking us to B eventually, but it's also responsible for the journey from A to where we are today!

A being the Big Bang and B being heat death (est. 1.7×10^106 years).

The broken part is that the system overall has negative incentives. We, as humans, want to improve humans’ lives, make technological progress, provide for our needs, etc. and the current strategy of prioritizing profit over any other metric only sometimes aligns with these goals.

Come up with a different measurement for good that is equally wanted and fungible

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