Some ideas / sectors for impactful businesses:

• A financial company focused on facilitating funding for businesses in LMICs, like a broker-dealer, private equity fund, private credit platform (like Centrifuge), or even a stock excange.. The main positive impact is basically accelerating economic growth by increasing the availability of finance.
  • As a particular example, a few years ago, someone mentioned that emerging market infrastructure bonds attract limited investor attention as they have long duration (20 years) and thin secondary markets (so you often actually have to wait 20 years to cash out).
  • This might require some financial engineering to work, such as using a SPAC or tokenization to make these investments liquid, or bundling loans to reduce total risk.
  • My experience is that investors can be hesitant about private deals in emerging markets, so nurturing investor relations should be a huge focus area for such a business.
• Given many problems of a contemporary research ecosystem, I would take a look at a decentralized science space for novel models of funding research, most likely aiming to create a platform company.
• It’s also worth exploring the regenerative finance space. Though I find many ReFi not very promising or impactful, there are probably golden nuggets there. I spoke to a few people exploring a speculative but interesting idea of tokenizing in-ground gold reserves to make them tradable without extraction, thus mitigating carbon emissions.
• I’m excited about privacy-preserving identity proofs (e.g., for KYC purposes), though this will require significant regulatory work to get traction. I spoke to two founders who built some technologies but didn’t deploy them due to regulatory challenges.
• There are probably many good opportunities in deep tech, such as asteroid mining or gene therapy
• I’m also quite excited about education (see Primer or Dynamicland)

Concerns:

• Can be hard for a generalist founder
• Mostly don’t target LMIC

On a side note, I think it’s useful to design an impact-focused business in a way that makes “value drift” less likely, e.g., by incorporating as a benefit corporation, having a stakeholder representation on a Board and/or an ethics committee, explicitly tracking impact, and nurturing positive corporate culture. I also speculate that worker cooperative model reduces propensity to engage in rent-seeking, but don’t have good evidence for that.

I like this broad framing of epistemics and interventions to improve it! I've spent some cognitive compute on what could constitute an introductory curriculum on epistemics in certain social circles I'm part of. I concluded that I'd probably start with even more basic ideas: teaching robust reasoning and basing beliefs on evidence; sometimes just clearly formulating beliefs.

I have found competitive debating to be relatively effective in improving technical proficiency in reasoning, but I've also seen such skill growth deepen confirmation bias by providing more tool to justify pre-existing beliefs. This probably implies the importance of pairing more "technique-focused" practices with things that improve epistemic virtuosness (therapy / ego reduction?).