The world needs more smarter idealists!

Stop sneering at for-profit impact!

In the traditional social sector, there is a familiar grimace; the kind reserved for something slightly distasteful. It miraculously appears in an otherwise normal conversation, whenever someone mentions a “for-impact, for-profit” & that too a startup. The unspoken suspicion is; ‘another capitalist masquerading as a do-gooder’

It is about time we dismantle this knee-jerk disdain, not because the for-profit impact sector is perfect, but because the world does not have the luxury of this ‘ideological gatekeeping’ anymore

The lazy binary at the heart of this divide is this

• profit & purpose are mutually exclusive
• real impact must come at the cost of financial gain &
• that anyone making money while solving social problems must be either opportunistic or naive!

But here is the truth: profit is not the enemy of impact. Exploitation is & the two are not the same

• Many for-profit impact ventures do not make money from the communities they serve
• They make money around them; through smart pricing, B2B layers, ecosystem services, or aligned commercial models
• These are not business tricks; they are survival strategies that unlock scale & sustainability where philanthropy often gasps for breath

But perhaps the biggest irony of all!

• the traditional social sector is largely bankrolled by the very capitalist system it claims to resist!
• Where does one think that the billionaires funding NGOs made their money from? They made that in the for-profit sector; finance, banking, tech, industry…
• What about the foundations writing those big cheques? Their monies & endowments are invested in the same markets that exploit public labour, pollute ecosystems & concentrate wealth in the hands of those few
• What about the grants & CSR budgets flowing through non-profits? These originate in the balance sheets of corporations accused of creating the very problems they now want to solve

Yet, somehow, when a for-profit venture tries to build a more aligned, self-sustaining, impact-driven model, it’s accused of selling out. This is not moral rigour. It is hypocrisy!

Let us remember, the social sector, for all its moral authority, has its own shadows; bloated overheads, grant dependency, performative virtue & a systemic fear of anything that smells like scale. Let us be honest. Most non-profits have become mere machines for survival. Not engines of change!

Meanwhile, for-impact, for-profit ventures are held to brutal standards: product-market fit, real metrics, financial durability. If they fail, they die. If they succeed, they scale. That kind of pressure isn’t a bug. It is a bloody feature!

Of course, there are bad actors in the for-profit space. I wont go in to that. But to dismiss an entire category because of it’s worst examples is sheer intellectual laziness

The real question is not whether a business model is for-profit or not. It is whether it is honest, ethical, effective & aligned

• Does it create value without extraction?
• Does it centre the dignity of the communities it serves?
• Does it solve root causes, not just symptoms?
• If the answer is yes to all, who cares?

It is about time the social sector stopped guarding the gates of virtue & started building bridges of pragmatism. The future demands more than moral purity. It demands clever, courageous builders who can navigate complexity with both heart & hustle

Impact is too important to be left only to charities or for that matter, only to capitalism. The smartest idealists will work in the space between!