Can tech for good really exist within a for-profit model?

Most people who have worked in tech long enough carry a version of the same question: does the industry actually make the world better, or does it just tell itself it does?

In this episode of Tech Tomorrow, David Elliman speaks with Jim Fruchterman, who has spent more than thirty years building an answer for this exact question.

Meet the guest: Jim Fruchterman

Jim Fruchterman is a serial social entrepreneur, podcast host, and author of Technology for Good, published in 2025. The book is widely considered the first of its kind: a practical guide to starting a tech company that deliberately prioritises impact over profit. He is the founder of Benetech, a nonprofit technology company whose products have included reading machines for blind users, anti-landmine mapping software, and digital tools for human rights advocates.

His background is in Silicon Valley engineering. That grounding in how commercial technology actually gets built shapes everything he has to say about whether for-profit companies can create genuine social good, and when they cannot. 

Key takeaways from the episode

The boardroom moment that started everything

Jim's story begins with an OCR start-up doing around $15 million in annual revenue. A side project, built quietly by the marketing and engineering teams, had produced a prototype reading machine for blind users. The demo worked, and a voice synthesiser read aloud from a printed page in front of an impressed board.

Then came the question: how big is the market? About $1 million a year, Jim replied.

The silence that followed was, in his words, very uncomfortable. An investor summed it up: ‘I'm not seeing the connection to the $25 million we've collectively invested in this company’.

The board vetoed the project, and Jim understood their reasoning: ‘They had excellent business reasons. Just not great social reasons’, he says.

What followed was a decisive fork in the road, and Jim chose not to drop the idea. He found a lawyer willing to work pro bono, started a nonprofit on the side, and told his wife it would be part-time for a year. That was over thirty years ago.

The lesson he drew from the boardroom was simple: the corporate form shapes what decisions are even possible. Once you take venture capital, the direction of travel is largely set.

What happens when you run a nonprofit like a tech company

Benetech became what Jim had not seen anywhere else: a charity that sold products. Reading machines for blind users were the revenue stream. Within three years, it had reached $5 million annually, break-even, funded entirely by customer revenue. The US Internal Revenue Service was genuinely confused. Charities were not supposed to make a profit.

The model worked because Jim borrowed everything useful from Silicon Valley and applied it to a market Silicon Valley had already written off. Human-centred design, agile development, proper tech support, dedicated salespeople, real user experience engineering. 

David finds this familiar from his own forty years in software. Some of the most disciplined, most motivated engineering teams he has worked with have been building systems where nobody mentions the share price. The conversation is about whether a benefits payment lands on the right day, or whether a hospital system stays up so a clinician can do their job. A clear mission does not make engineering discipline optional. If anything, it raises the stakes.

‘Do good on purpose rather than evil by accident’

Jim's most quotable line deserves careful reading, because it carries a harder edge than it first appears.

His observation is that many of Silicon Valley's most harmful products were not built with harmful intent. Companies set out to do something useful, discovered that a more addictive or extractive version of their product paid better, and doubled down on that version. The incentive structure did the rest. As Jim puts it plainly: evil, in some cases, turns out to be quite profitable.

Structural commitment is what actually changes this, not moral aspiration. Jim points to two practical models that embed accountability before it is tested:

• B Corporations, which embed social and environmental accountability directly into their governance and legal structure.
• The Pledge 1% movement, where start-ups commit a percentage of their equity to charity before it is worth anything. That commitment can become tens of millions of dollars by the time a company goes public.

Companies that make these commitments behave differently in practice, Jim argues. They create real value and, in his observation, have healthier internal cultures than organisations where profit has become the only metric that counts. The engineers he knows do not get out of bed for the share price. They get out of bed because they have built something genuinely useful.

Choosing the right model for the right problem

One of Jim's clearest contributions in the episode is reframing the whole debate. Tech for good is a question of fit, not a matter of principle.

He describes a three-part picture:

1. For-profit, where incentives align: clean energy, affordable fintech, healthtech. These have real markets, and commercial incentives and social benefit reinforce each other. Jim is unambiguous: if he wanted to build solar capacity for smallholder farmers in emerging markets, he would choose a for-profit structure.
2. Charity, where there is no business model: human rights, civil liberties, services for the deeply marginalised. Nobody is going to make money protecting women's rights activists. That work belongs in the charity space.
3. The wide middle ground: B Corps, social enterprises, community interest companies, nonprofits structured to sell products and sustain themselves on margin.

Jim wrote a paper years ago called For Love or Lucre, which asked exactly this question: when you have an idea that does social good, which structure will actually get you there? His answer, then and now, is whichever one works best for the specific problem.

The real dynamics of for-profit and nonprofit partnerships

When Jim left his OCR company to start Benetech, his former employer gave him a 75% discount on their hardware product. His investors had no objection to helping blind users. Their objection was to distracting the core business from making money. Once Jim was an external customer, that tension disappeared entirely. He became a buyer, and they gave him credit.

More striking is what happens when Jim approaches large tech companies and asks for free licences to their core products. They say yes roughly 80% of the time. The reason, he argues, is craft. Engineers care deeply about what their products can do and where they reach. The fact that a product will never make it to rural Zambia, or into the hands of a child with a disability, genuinely troubles them. 

The relationship has real limits, though. Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce all made significant commitments to nonprofit pricing over the years, and all of them eventually clawed those commitments back as the markets they had written off began to look commercially interesting. Salesforce went as far as creating a dedicated charity, Salesforce.org, and then had to pay $300 million to buy it back into the company when they changed their minds.

David's read on this is direct: real generosity in this space means long-term commitments, properly maintained open-source contributions, engineering support behind the discounted licence, and willingness to share skills alongside software. The difference between a marketing line and a meaningful movement plays out over decades, not quarters.

So, can tech for good really exist within a for-profit model?

Yes, and the evidence for this is more abundant than the conversation around tech usually allows.

For-profit companies that treat social impact as a genuine metric, sitting alongside revenue and growth rather than underneath them, can create lasting good. The harder truth is that companies which make commitments and then withdraw them as commercial stakes rise have not actually helped. They have delayed the problem and, as the Salesforce and Microsoft examples show, damaged trust along the way.

Jim's broader point is that the question itself may be slightly too narrow. Tech for good depends on a thriving commercial technology sector, on the core infrastructure, the open-source platforms, the app stores and smartphones that make new applications possible at all. The nonprofit sector is not going to build a $5 billion chip foundry. What it can do is take what exists, apply it with discipline to the problems the market has already given up on, and reach further than commercial incentives would ever allow.

The choice, as Jim puts it, belongs to every tech leader. It is available today. And it starts with a practical question, not a grand mission statement: what problem are we actually solving, and what is the right structure to solve it?