And because there isn't much money to be made in it, you really can't make it scale on the back of its own business-model. So there's really nothing a startup can do to help with these problems.

However, I think there's a case to be made that startups can become an important part of solving these problems: they rake in money from wealthy sectors of the population, they're usually quite high-margin, and they are headed by small, smart, effective groups of people, who could make the decision to engage in Effective Altruism with their proceeds.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing more for the world's problems than any little start-up aiming to help people track their dogs' sleep-cycles--but it could have been started way earlier, when Microsoft was way smaller, and still be having just as much of an impact--if it had been the whole organization on-board, instead of just a private hobby of the founder.

(Really, any company could join in on this at any point, but the more bureaucratic and self-sustaining the business culture has become--which usually happens proportionally to scale--the less likely it is to happen. Far easier to convince a few guys in their garage that this is their end-goal-after-the-end-goal, rather than to convince a company already making big money that they should reorganize their corporate vision to doing good.)