My feeling is that people start out wanting to create a company either because it's trendy to do, or because they have a big idea they care about. I've rarely

My feeling is that people start out wanting to create a company either because it's trendy to do, or because they have a big idea they care about. I've rarely run into a business consultant, adviser, etc who doesn't immediately want to rein that in and advise that they do something smaller and profitable. It's not bad business advice, but I think that people just tend to get more conservative about what they're willing to try after being bombarded by consistent messaging that they should scale back their ambitions. I'm not sure I think that's bad honestly, a lot of ambitious ideas are really bad and usually more based in the assumption that the competition is stupid than what I'd call honest vision. It's good for the bottom line probably, but definitely sets an upper bound on how far you could take a project aimed at broad social welfare goals that wouldn't or shouldn't generate a profit. I've seen funding of non-profits (not sure if VC or not) but truly unsure how that works if investors actually expect something in return. They seem to have to rely on government grants and the largess of the already wealthy.