Most Founders Pass The Impact Baton On
Why is 99% of the world's population overlooked by the majority of startups?
Founder Notes · Sam · 9 July 2026 · 3 min read
A lot of startups are just new ways to make privileged people slightly more privileged. It's not something founders do consciously. It's structural. But once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Founders build for nearby problems
Paul Graham wrote about schlep blindness: the tendency to avoid hard, unglamorous problems.[1] But founders don't just avoid hard problems. We literally can't see most of them.
We build around problems near us: our own problems, our friends' problems, our old company's problems. Most of us come from a similar background. Top university, then tech, finance, or consulting. We know people from those circles. Our "nearby problems" are the problems of people who already have plenty of tools, access, and money.
The result is more dev tools, more meeting tools and more productivity tools. All built for the same narrow group of society.
We're passing the baton on
Many of us think: "If I build something useful for a narrow group, that will empower them to build amazing things for a broader group."
But in reality, proximity bias kicks in again. The 'broader impact baton' gets passed to our users. They pass it to their users. Everyone assumes someone further along will eventually point technology at the people who need it most.
Venture capital reinforces this by rewarding markets and founders who pattern-match to previous winners. Less than 15% of global venture funding goes into impact-aligned companies.[2] Only a fraction of that reaches problems facing 99% of the world's population outside the wealthiest markets.[3]
The result is a system that funds and serves a narrow group of the world's population. And the impact baton keeps getting passed on.
What we asked ourselves
Before we started building Storra, there were some questions we wanted to ask. Are we building this because the problem matters, or because it's only what we can see? Could the first or second order effects of our product genuinely change someone's life? Will this be a small improvement for a few people near us, or potentially a meaningful one for a much broader group?
There are roughly 10 million nonprofits globally. They represent the world's largest library of untold human stories. Most of those stories are never seen, because nonprofits lack the funding, the production capability and the distribution to tell them properly.
Storra can change that.
If we create a new content category that brings billions of views to stories that deserve attention, through creators who tell those stories powerfully, we can create a step change in the fundraising potential of those organisations, and by extension their ability to help billions of people.