← Back to feed

If cleantech funding is scarce, does founding another startup actually help the world?

L1 · CuriousOpinion & AnalysisLessWrong AI· 10/6/2026

Explores career impact considerations for AI/tech professionals thinking about entrepreneurship for social good.

AI Summary

A student questions whether founding another cleantech startup actually creates social impact when funding is limited, suggesting new ventures might just redirect existing resources.

Excerpt

For context, I’m a student trying to choose a career where they can have maximum impact. One path I’m considering is founding a cleantech startup. However, I’m worried that even if I found a startup, I might not actually increase the total amount of socially impactful work being done in the world. Here’s my reasoning: suppose, very crudely, that the total social benefit produced by the cleantech sector scales with the number of cleantech startups that get funded. Also suppose there are more "via

Read Original
0 upvotes · 0 downvotes · 1 min read

Related Articles

L5 · ResearcherOpinion & Analysis@emollick.bsky.social
Ethan Mollick (@emollick.bsky.social): After a brief but institution-eroding slop science era, it increasingly looks like we are going to have 2 revolutions from AI: 1) Everything ever published will be re-read and re-judged in ways that h

Ethan Mollick predicts AI will enable systematic re-evaluation of all published research and accelerate scientific discovery beyond human absorption capacity.

L5 · ResearcherOpinion & AnalysisLessWrong AI
The Lens That Conceals Its Flaws: Nonsense at the Heart of the Sequences

Critique of LessWrong's intellectual influence on AI, arguing the community that shaped AI thinking has conceptual flaws despite its members' roles in frontier labs and alignment research.

L2 · PractitionerOpinion & Analysis@emollick.bsky.social
Ethan Mollick (@emollick.bsky.social): When people talk about AI easily replacing workers, I think about this ethnography of copier repair technicians in the 1990s. Reading it, you see how work is complicated and improvised by workers and

Ethnography of 1990s copier technicians shows work is more complex and improvised than assumed, challenging simplistic AI replacement narratives despite eventual automation.

L2 · PractitionerOpinion & AnalysisSimon Willison's Blog
Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging

Simon Willison shares Michael Lynch's advice against AI-generated blandness in software blogging, urging developers to write with personality.

L5 · ResearcherOpinion & AnalysisLessWrong AI
Why did we get warning shots?

An outside analyst examines why AI warning shots occurred and argues that dismissing AI x-risk as sci-fi is becoming increasingly untenable.