Startups and Charities

Hacker and entrepreneur Paul Graham recently posted a fascinating essay on his website called Be Good. He makes the point that a startup in its early stages is similar to a charity - it's trying to do something that people want, and it's not too worried about money.

He goes from there to think about the idea of creating a startup instead of a charity to fix whatever issue you're passionate about. He says:

How wide is this territory? Would all good nonprofits be good companies? Possibly not. What makes Google so valuable is that their users have money. If you make people with money love you, you can probably get some of it. But could you also base a successful startup on behaving like a nonprofit to people who don't have money? Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?

I'm not sure, but I suspect that if you pushed this idea, you'd be surprised how far it would go.

As an aside, a couple of people in the comments thread pointed out that there is someone trying to create a social networking site that will focus on eradicating malaria.

This all got me thinking about helping the homeless - I can't think of a way to create a startup that would help the homeless, so I'd like to throw this idea out there to all of you - is there some radically different thing we could do here? I don't know, but it's worth thinking about.