TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Be Good - Paul Graham

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. For example, people who apply to Y Combinator don’t generally have much money, and yet we can profit by helping them, because with our help they could make money. Maybe the situation is similar with malaria. Maybe an organization that helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting growth.

I’m not proposing this is a serious idea. I don’t know anything about malaria. But I’ve been kicking ideas around long enough to know when I come across a powerful one.

 Utterly fascinating question. What would a company dedicated to fighting, say, poverty look like? How would it make its revenue? Expect a post soon from me exploring this idea.