Comment by flakiness
10 hours ago
To be honest, this feels more like a lifestyle business (aka hobby) than a startup. They truly deserve it, but I don't expect a huge success as a business.
That said, I hope they write cool papers with various peers across the industry without worrying too much about the competing dynamics. That'd be a blessing for humanity, and good for their spirit.
A public benefit corp shouldn’t be a start up. The primary goal of a start up is to grow as quickly as possible which is rarely benefits the public.
Very silly to call every non start up a lifestyle business. It’s just a business. Start up are the weird thing that almost always an obscene waste of time and money, but sometime creates google.
A PBC is not a charity or a non-profit. PBCs are for-profit businesses with the goal of making money. In day-to-day business they're indistinguishable with other for-profit corporations, including fundraising and investment. The only real practical difference is that they give directors a little more leeway in their fiduciary duties to say "no" to doing evil things.
The advantage to a PBC is protecting founders from a serious problem with standard corporations: you might bring on investors who could subsequently demand you pollute, exploit people, and/or do other immoral activities for profit. You don't have to do these things to grow a business quickly.
> The only real practical difference is that they give directors a little more leeway in their fiduciary duties to say "no" to doing evil things.
I’d like to provide maybe a clarification here that there is zero existing fiduciary duty in regular corporations to say yes to evil things, or even to turn a profit at all. A for-profit C corporation can legally sell stock, lose money every year, and go out of business, if the board of directors approves that strategy. Fiduciary duty exists primarily in areas of accurate communication and the avoidance of crime, fraud, etc.
A B corp basically is a C corp, but one that has formally published that their strategy includes a commitment to some social benefit. But if a C corp wanted to publish the same message to shareholders it could, and shareholder recourse would basically be to either try to replace the board, or sell the stock.
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Anthropic is a PBC.
> The primary goal of a start up is to grow as quickly as possible which is rarely benefits the public.
Why is that so? Fast growth, when achieved honestly, is a result of solving user pain that others haven't. Maybe you think so because users != the public, but I think in totality the public is a collection of users who all have needs they want met.
For certain amount of fast growth: yes. Then there's continued "growth-hacking" and enshittification to keep fast revenue growing after the pain point has been solved with dark patterns and questionable tactics.
Why? Because investors poured a bunch of money in to support fast growth and now they want their money back. And incremental growth won't do. Since 9 out of 10 of the investments fail, the surviving one has to continue to growth-hacking revenues.
Fair point. Their page doesn't list any investors.
The Times article lists several.
It can be both. Bell Labs performed a lot of speculative research while still producing economically valuable technology.
I don't see how not? A theoretical physicist can do all the thinking they want but if they can't test an idea against nature it's not super useful.
> To be honest, this feels more like a lifestyle business (aka hobby) than a startup
They're also incredibly productive and can build/deliver really good stuff, so who knows :)