That’s why I want to start business and not non-profits: businesses are self-sustaining reactions. Whereas even the best charities are hampered by the limits to their fundraising.

I don’t want to start businesses to get rich myself (fuck that, honestly). I want to start businesses to create self-sustaining transformations to improve the world. To create a process that sustains itself and makes a big dent on suffering.

I sense great potential in the crossbreeding of entrepreneurship and science. Much of the best science is entrepreneurial in nature; and much of the best entrepreneurship is almost scientific. This is probably no coincidence and there could be a systematic pattern here that we can employ.

Business as a force for change is hampered by profit maximization. Profit maximization is silly, from a collective perspective. We should be focusing on making businesses that are viable and that maximize impact. That’s the game.

There are two large untapped sources of potential:

• Innovation of all kinds that we’re having a hard time reaching because of inherent limits of profit maximizing companies.
• A lot of talented people that are hungry to work on meaningful things and who are languishing inside existing production structures.

My bet/hypothesis is that unlocking this potential is what will take us to unlock the end of scarcity and the beginning of an age of abundance.

I’m not saying that businesses are generally better than non-profits, or that non-profits are unnecessary (they are not). But non-profits, by definition, can never be self-sustaining. Profits are excess energy that can be used to grow the process.

Governments have their place in transformations, but they still haven’t been able to directly innovate in the production of wealth. Curiously, I believe that most of the middle class could become socialist if the government could run economies with a degree of efficiency comparable to current capitalism, but that doesn’t seem possible at all. I also believe that’s the same reason why the middle classes are generally wary (and correctly, in my view) of too much socialism.