Why Not a Non-Profit?#
Why this work stays a for-profit venture — and the case for a charitable-by-design company the world does not yet have.
I get this question constantly. Usually it arrives as advice — kindly meant, occasionally a little patronising: surely a non-profit is what someone doing public-good work should be. People look genuinely baffled when I say: no, thank you. Here is the long answer, because I have thought about it for years, and the reasons matter for what ResearchCity is trying to be.
Reason one: I cannot honestly pick a single mission box#
A non-profit must declare a fixed mission, in a category. Every time I have tried to choose mine, I have failed — not from indecision, but because the work genuinely spans the boxes:
Is it medical? I model how to stop pandemics.
Is it educational? I care a great deal about how mathematics is taught.
Is it religious? I talk about God, seriously and at length.
Is it political? I refuse to fall silent when something political matters to averting catastrophe.
Pick one and I must amputate the others — or quietly misrepresent what I do. The whole point of this work is that the world’s hardest problems do not respect our categories; that is why they go unsolved. An entity that forces me to pretend otherwise is the wrong entity.
Reason two: I need a competitor’s flexibility#
A for-profit can turn to address whatever the problem requires, the moment it requires it. A non-profit moves inside a long corset of declared purposes, permitted activities, and prohibitions. For most charities that corset is fine. For work whose entire value is following the problem wherever it leads — across physics, biology, game theory, theology, policy — the corset is a cage. I need the same freedom of movement any money-making competitor has, precisely so I can chase the Truth instead of my paperwork.
Reason three: the overhead is not worth it (ask Craig)#
When the founder of craigslist, Craig Newmark, looked hard at this same
question, he kept craigslist a for-profit company — and famously runs it
like a non-profit: lean, mission-first, refusing to squeeze it for every
dollar. By his own account he turned down roughly $11 billion by not
monetising everything, and was at peace with it: “my moral compass was set in
Sunday school… you should know when enough is enough”
(Inc., 2025).
To be precise, since the figure gets garbled: he forewent about $11 billion
by not selling out — he did not give that much away; his actual giving runs
to roughly $450 million and a Giving Pledge. He has been blunt that going
non-profit would mean giving up the freedom to “do all that cool stuff,” and
craigslist even uses its .org name to signal the public-service spirit
while staying a private for-profit corporation.
If running a top-tier website as a lean, public-spirited for-profit is good enough for Craig of craigslist, it is good enough for me. (One correction I owe my own argument: craigslist is a corporation, not an LLC — the lesson is the for-profit-over-non-profit choice, not the exact legal wrapper.) The compliance load a charity carries — the filings, the documentation, the constant proof that you have stayed inside your declared lane — is real, and for a one-person launch it would devour the very time the work exists to protect.
The real reason: I want both halves, and no existing box gives me both#
Here is the structural problem, stated plainly: charities lack business agility; businesses lack charitable accountability. Non-profits are accountable to a mission but cannot move freely; companies can move but answer only to profit. I want both — the agility and the accountability. No off-the-shelf entity offers that, so part of this work is to help build one.
I call it the LLCC — a Limited Liability Charitable Company: the flexibility and power of an LLC merged with the goodwill and accountability of a charity, run on transparent economics. That is what Station STb11-LCC is for. It is also home to ideas like Fiduciaries Sharing Futures — fiduciaries who guard long-term value instead of short-selling the future for a quick gain.
The deeper ambition: a clean break from “the empire”#
The modern corporation did not fall from the sky. Its form — joint-stock ownership, limited liability, the chartered monopoly — grew substantially out of the colonial trading companies: the Dutch and English East India Companies, and outfits like the Royal African Company, which was England’s slave trade for a generation. Historians treat these chartered companies as the direct forerunners of the modern corporation. The form we inherited still carries traits from that extractive era — built to extract from “over there” for the benefit of “over here.”
I am looking for a clean break: a rethink of what a corporation should be in the twenty-first century, no longer tethered to the old exploitative ways of the empire. I have been trying for years to find people interested in fleshing this out, and have not yet succeeded. Maybe — maybe — this launch is the moment it finally starts properly. I do not think ResearchCity stands a chance without this Station to handle the business questions.
What I am not claiming#
I am not pretending I can draft the legal articles before launch, or without lawyers I cannot yet afford. When the time comes, the filing will say something like: I remain the “benevolent dictator” only until I can, in a controlled way, hand those powers to a well-understood LLCC operating system — one that uses the ZION pattern to keep evolving itself gently, kindly, reasonably, and to break the BABL patterns that make great things destroy themselves. That is a serious design task, not a launch-day footnote; it needs real collaborators and real legal counsel. So treat this page as a statement of intent and an invitation, not a finished charter.
The short version: I am not avoiding non-profit status to dodge responsibility. I am refusing it to take on more — the responsibility to build a company form actually worth trusting.
A sanity check on the money (because someone always asks about taxes)#
“But if you stay for-profit, won’t the tax bill wreck your 50%?” Short answer: no. Here is the arithmetic.
Corporate tax is levied on profit (revenue minus costs), not on revenue. So the scary-sounding rates are far smaller measured against total money in:
Global average corporate income tax: ~23.5% of profit (~25.7% weighted). US combined (federal + state): ~26%. Highest in the world: ~35–36% (France, Colombia, Suriname) — all of profit (Tax Foundation, 2025).
Taxes that are on revenue (state gross-receipts taxes) run ~0.1–2%. VAT/GST is collected from customers and passed through — not a tax on my money, and donations are generally not VAT-able anyway.
Is there anywhere the state takes more than half of total revenue? In normal business, no — the only regimes that high are oil/gas/mining resource taxes, irrelevant here. So the “exactly 50% to the common good” structure is safe in every jurisdiction a sane person would incorporate in: even a worst case where my whole inflow were taxed at the highest realistic rate leaves the 50/50 intact — the tax simply comes out of the external half, alongside the causes.
The one genuine open question is the tax base, not the rate: as a for-profit that also gives half away, am I taxed on the full inflow, and are the give-aways deductible? That changes how much of the external half is tax versus chosen causes — never whether I cross 50%. And it is exactly the question an accountant and the Station STb11-LCC work will settle. I will not improvise tax law here; I will state only the values and the structure, and pay what I owe — willingly.
The transparency this company would run on: The Transparency Manifesto
The deeper Station: STb11-LCC — Charitable Company Standards
How to help: Buy In