2 ms·

> I'm waiting for the entrepreneur who will say he doesn't care how much money he makes or how many customers he has, only that it's worthwhile and needed doing

• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Not necessarily. I think it's PG who mentioned it in some other essays, but "non-profit" and "company" can be seen as different ways to make things happen, a different models of getting society's help with bringing your visions into the real world. Non-profits tend to depend on other people's generosity; for-profits have to earn their money directly. Both have to care about money to some extent, as money is the lifeblood of all large-scale endeavors in this world. All of that is orthogonal to doing something worthwhile. There's plenty of non-profits that exist primarily to make money for the founders. Conversely, there's e.g. Elon Musk and SpaceX, which is a successful for-profit with an explicit, unchanging, non-monetary terminal goal: making humanity multiplanetary, by bringing down the costs of space so that it's economical to venture there and colonize Mars (you can argue whether that's worthwhile, but I think it's well proven that Musk/SpaceX are honestly pursuing space, not money).