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This isn't some law of physics. A corporation could decide that their ultimate goal is to improve society, the planet, employees’s lives, consumers’s lives, etc above pure profit. This would of course result in less profit.



I said these projects are launched with both good intentions and profit. That Google has done plenty to help the world is indisputable.


They could. But if they commit to relinquishing control of their enterprise to outside VC investors (as practically all SV companies do; there's no such thing as a self-bootstrapped unicorn!) they won't.


If you want an example of a tech company that actually decided to prioritize public good, I'd present Kickstarter, which has specifically registered itself as a public benefit corporation. They are admittedly a lot smaller, and I'm sure there were a lot of situational details that made it possible, but they did it.


There are billion-dollar companies like Zoho and Atlassian that have been bootstrapped.


Atlassian and Zoho are B2B enterprise shops. Not unicorns, and not facing the same bad incentives as consumer-facing companies.


A unicorn are startups that have gone to become worth at least $1 billion. That's it. B2B is not relevant to that classification.


Publicly held corporations won't make such a choice. The shareholders demand value over everything.


Purism (the makers of Librem hardware) are a "Social Purpose Corporation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation

Which I believe both can be publicly held, and as stated in Florida, shareholders can actually go after them for failing to create a public benefit.

Perhaps in the future, we should be hesitant to ascribe positive social traits to corporations which don't have this in-built motivation.


Corporate management defines that value.




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