Comment by wly_cdgr
3 years ago
Hard to answer without knowing more about your values and perspective, friend. A lot of smart, experienced, well-informed, decent, and sincere people would say you can't do much better than Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, or Exxon Mobil (although maybe not so many of those people hang out here on HN). Less controversially/polarizingly, even more people would point you towards companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, SpaceX, Ford, Atlassian, etc
However, since you mentioned that you think your goal probably rules out FANG, I'm gonna make some rough guesstimates about your values and recommend companies like:
* Wikimedia Foundation
* Khan Academy & to a lesser extent Brilliant.org, and to an even lesser extent Masterclass and Outlier
* edX, YouTube (for the enormous amount of high quality educational content on there) & to a lesser extent Coursera
* MIT & other major research universities, especially ones working actively to expand and improve their free/low-cost online offerings
* Intercept Games, Zachtronics, Wube Software, Giant Army, Klei, Microsoft (cos of Minecraft), SCS Software, Dry Cactus, Fakt Software, and the many other companies making games that inspire, support, and develop intellectual curiosity, creativity, systems thinking, analytical reasoning, etc
* Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, etc
* Raspberry Pi Foundation
* Blink Fitness & other companies that provide and promote low-cost, accessible fitness
* Melodics & other tools that help people build their musical skills and confidence
* Content creation software companies like Procreate, Image-Line Software, Adobe, Affinity, Apple (Logic Pro), Cycling '74, Cockos, etc etc
There are many ways to feed a cat
Overall love your list! Definitely adding some of these companies on my mental list to pursue should the current work dry up, and would suggest perhaps adding the Electronic Frontier Foundation for similar accessibility / digital advocacy work.
However would personally remove Adobe as the single black eye to the entire list -- I cannot think of a more morally bankrupt company short of FAANG, and possibly surpassing FAANG -- due to its habits of dark patterns, subscription shenaniganry, and jacking up prices way beyond what most hobbyists/students can afford let alone professionals who are not part of an enterprise platform.
Doesn’t the rest of FAANG sell subscriptions to zero-marginal-cost digital goods as well? Is Adobe doing something different?