Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Longtime Beneblog readers may remember my visit five years ago to Bangladesh, where I was able to visit and write about a cool tech social enterprise, bracNet . They were going to bring Bangladesh better wireless internet than exists in California, and they’ve done it. I recently had the opportunity to visit with one of their main funders, George Hara, in San Francisco. George is a financial mastermind with one foot in Asia and the other in California. Public Interest Capitalism is his personal brand of social change. A longtime venture capitalist with his DEFTA Partners firm , he wants to help solve social problems using hybrid capital structures that meld nonprofit and for-profit partners. He uses the Alliance Forum Foundation as one of his vehicles for making deals along these lines in Asia and Africa. He's written several papers on his approach, including this one entitled Retooling Capitalism . bracNet is one of these hybrid ventures, joining a majority for-profit ownership le...

I frequently get asked by folks I know in the for-profit tech sector (where I come from), why we don't focus on making money. The team at Benetech seems very strong, and it seems clear we could go off and find a way to make big money. I agree. But, that's not Benetech. We chose a nonprofit form to do those things we were sure the for-profit world wouldn't do. Or, if they did, they would keep focusing on those "applications with commercial potential." We pretty much exist to adapt technology developed for those "applications with commercial potential" to applications with great social impact and limited commercial potential. When you have two bottom lines, one of them is the deciding factor. When your organization faces a critical choice (and most organizations seem to need to make these choices), it will pick the bottom line that reflects its organizational charter. If serving shareholders is that bottom line, because you're a for-profit, I re...