This is spot on and shows how much Silicon Valley is out of touch with the reality on the ground and dismissive of non-profits and government agencies that handle these sort of things.
When non-profits succeed they have to ask for more money. When for-profits succeed, they fund themselves. So it's far better for a for-profit to solve a given problem than a non-profit, as they are inherently more scalable.
>When non-profits succeed they have to ask for more money.
That's not true at all. I worked for 3 years on a non-profit that funded itself and it received external donations and investments. This is not "either self-funding or external-funding". The whole idea of a nonprofit is that instead of sharing the surplus of revenues between shareholders, leaders or members, it will invest the surplus further into the company development and projects. It has nothing to do with scalability.
I think it's more about aligning incentives with investors. Money put into a non-profit is a full write-off and so can really only have altruistic motivations. For-profit allows for investments that are motivated by a mixture of altruism and self-interest, which (for better or worse) allows for a much larger supply of capital.
