The Societal Dividend

On Building Businesses That Matter

What are companies for?

In The Gospel of Wealth, Andrew Carnegie wrote that the true industrialist produces “good, honest work” and that surplus wealth must eventually flow back into society, scorning enterprises that existed as “merely money-making concerns.” Joe Lonsdale writes about this concept too and calls it solution philanthropy: using the profit motive to engineer the public good.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about these ideas, and more broadly the core purpose of a company, as I stand at the threshold of building my second startup.

In 2012, I founded Beam Benefits with two co-founders, Alex and Dan, who I met in engineering school in Louisville, KY. We originally imagined the company as an IOT business, building smart toothbrushes for more precisely underwriting dental insurance to expand coverage to 100 million uninsured Americans. This was around the same time the ACA was being implemented with a similar goal to get all Americans insured. We raised our Series A after a fateful connection at the Kentucky Derby, and subsequently built the leading platform for digital employee benefits products for underserved small businesses. Today, Beam has scaled to cover 25,000 clients in 45+ states with around 500,000 members and hundreds of millions in annual revenue.

At Beam, I used to warn against the quiet tragedy of becoming the very thing we set out to replace. We created an entirely new business model for pricing risk, rewarding preventive behavior and lowering prices to increase the rate of insured Americans. We didn’t want to slowly sunset all of the unique aspects of our model and voice to become another generic insurer that can only win business on mindshare from advertising spend. Success can make a company inert if it forgets what made it alive in the first place. At the time I was also building my reputation for the first time as a builder. Raising capital, recruiting talent, managing teams, and aligning strategy were all skills that Beam helped me learn and refine.

The question I’ve been asking myself all year, before committing myself to building again, is simple: If this company vanished tomorrow, would the world notice? Is our society thankful that this business exists?

The True Builder’s Ideal Form

I believe the ideal form of what a company can be goes further; rather than companies merely generating cash to be redistributed later, enterprise itself could be the vehicle for a better world. The company doesn’t make money to then separately express a worldview; it does so in the act of making money. This is the best way to durably assemble capital, top talent, and the right incentives around society’s most valuable problems.

I call these societal dividend companies.

The societal dividend is the value unlocked when a company’s core mission solves a problem of civilizational scale. It’s the modern heir to Silicon Valley’s once-earnest-now-deeply-overused phrase “change the world.” But it only works if the founders are willing to take existential risk and play on an elongated time horizon: decades, not funding cycles.

If more founders built societal dividend companies, creating a company could represent a modern form of civic work, specifically in its ability to contribute to society’s biggest asks and needs, instead of pure opportunism or extractive techniques. A company like this should be how new superpowers enter the world, in the form of new products and services that give citizens capabilities they didn’t previously have, or existing ones with higher value than before.

As a founder, there is nothing more inspiring than the idea of contributing to our society in the most intense, scalable, and productive way possible. This is what motivates me every day as I venture out again from zero to one myself.

What Makes a Societal Dividend Company?

Societal dividend companies mint both enterprise value and measurable public benefit, and are built on these foundations:

1. A Problem Worth Solving. The problem must be large enough to matter, yet orthogonal enough that incumbents are blinded by their current position. If the challenge doesn’t threaten anyone powerful, it’s probably too small.

2. An Inspirational Mission. The vision must naturally recruit A-players who already have great careers. People join movements, not projects. You can’t buy their loyalty or interest either. They must sense that the problem is not only lucrative but spiritually valuable, and aligned with their own worldview.

3. Viable Economics. Profit is not the enemy of virtue; it’s what disciplines it. Capital demands coherence, competence, and achievement. Philanthropy, for all its good intentions, rarely scales because it cannot enforce excellence. In fact, many philanthropies need the problem they purport to be fixing to continue to exist in order for them to justify ongoing funding, a massive perverse incentive.

4. Founder–Problem Fit. Some founders have asymmetrical insight, a lived familiarity with the problem that outsiders cannot mimic. That fit becomes an unfair advantage and the core of the company’s mythos.

Get all four, and you unlock a positive sum flywheel. Profits buy goodwill and goodwill lowers friction in sales and recruiting; that, in turn, compounds profit. Capital and culture reinforce one another.

SpaceX and Tesla as Societal Dividend Companies

Before 2008, a kilogram to low-Earth orbit cost roughly $30,000. Falcon 9’s reusable design slashed that to below $3,000, catalyzing constellations of private satellites, new industrial supply chains, and NASA’s own renaissance. A private company reopened a domain once monopolized by governments, and in doing so rewrote the economics of access to space. The downstream dividend is staggering: global connectivity, pharmaceutical research, defense, manufacturing, and the dream of a multi-planetary species.

Tesla’s trajectory follows a similar arc. In 2012, EVs were less than 1% of U.S. new-car sales; by 2025, they approach 9%. Battery pack costs have collapsed, every automaker has been forced to pivot, and the Overton Window has shifted meaningfully from “electric as novelty” to “electric as norm.” The company made its shareholders rich, but its deeper success was cultural: it changed what people imagine as possible.

These businesses are proof that capitalism, rightly configured, can bend the physics of the Matrix, and our culture, simultaneously.

Building a Societal Dividend Company

Most founders want impact but end up settling for comfort. They raise money, find early product-market fit, and then succumb to the gravitational pull of profit and acclaim. Turns out that there are a lot of exit ramps along the way that dilute the vision but fulfill someone’s idea of success, or avoid disaster. The result is countless successful companies that generate returns…but no revolutions. Packy McCormick notes in ‘The Company as a Machine for Doing Stuff’ that you have the right to [the] work only, but never to its fruits.

A true societal dividend company must repeatedly choose impact over convenience. It must resist the exit ramp, the easy acquisition, the premature victory lap. Otherwise, it will drift toward mediocrity, which is the natural resting state of every human endeavor once the original crisis has passed.

Part of subscribing to American culture is believing that things will get better in the future, but only if we strive for these improvements in the present. I believe that the best way to express this belief is to build companies that can set large ambitions, and attract capital and talent to flow in their direction to achieve these civilizational aims.

Now, I’m fortunate to stand at a moment in life where I’ve never been more prepared, and motivated, to contribute to society through building my own societal dividend company aimed at tackling one of its most difficult problems. I’m young enough to start again, experienced enough to know how, and surrounded by amazing people who can amplify my purpose. To stop here would feel like a betrayal of everything that got me here. Palmer Luckey has said he builds products for warfighters for the sake of the civilization that made his life as an American possible. That’s a calling I deeply feel; at a certain stage, creating and building stops being about personal validation and starts to resemble service: not charity, but contribution.

The purpose of my writing here is to discover and highlight societal dividend companies existing today, explore areas where I think (and hope) societal dividend companies can be built, and my curiosity about today’s world in order to build a more robust platform for more of these companies to be created in the future. I’ll also dedicate space to my chosen path of building in healthcare and a societal dividend company called Stack Health I just launched and will introduce in my next post. The builder’s duty is to push the frontier.

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