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teekertyesterday at 11:03 PM4 repliesview on HN

Why would for profits not make the world a better place?

For-profit does not mean “shareholders and ROI over user” or something. You can do for-profit and not enshtfy and make the world better. That’s my goal at least.


Replies

rlonntoday at 6:53 AM

The comment is a bit misguided: the operations Watsi helps perform would not have been possible without for-profit companies and for-profit innovators building the infrastructure of modern medicine. It's not one or the other: both for-profits and non-profits make the world a better place and I think they complement eachother. Sure, there are for-profits that do NOT make the world a better place, just like there are non-profits that fail in their mission to do good things. They just typically fail to do good things for different reasons.

taconetoday at 10:26 AM

Value makes the world a better place, not profits per-se. Sometimes the two things coincide, sometimes they don't.

i7ltoday at 12:46 AM

If profit is the objective, it will turn into growth-at-all-costs machine because that's how the mathematics works.

If, however, the objective is, say, improve as many lives as possible with the constraint of being profitable, it's definitely possible to do good. You just have to make sure you understand what level of profitability is sufficient, which is rare but doable.

TimorousBestieyesterday at 11:19 PM

> For-profit does not mean “shareholders and ROI over user” or something.

It’s not definitionally true, but it happens often enough that there’s no denying a clear trend.