Davis Smith knows what he’s doing when it comes to e-commerce. A 38-year-old serial entrepreneur, he founded, and later sold, an online pool table retailer straight out of business school; that venture lead him to cofound Baby.com.br, Brazil’s largest baby care retailer, for which he raised over $40 million in venture capital funding. But when Smith approached his attorney, with whom he’d worked through all his startup ventures, with the idea to found an outdoor gear brand with a humanitarian mission—and incorporate, from the beginning, as a benefit corporation—his attorney said no way. “He just told me, ‘Look, no one incorporates as a benefit corporation from inception,” Smith tells Fast Company. In 31 states (including Utah, where Smith is based), benefit corporation legislation allows businesses to incorporate while agreeing to support a wider mission than just appeasing shareholders—that could mean pledging to mitigate environmental problems, providing services to in-need communities, or more broadly, contributing to the “general public benefit.” The idea behind benefit corporations, as Fast Company has previously written, is that the impact-focused nature of these ventures should allow founders to pursue more humanitarian goals without fear of being sued by their investors for not immediately raking in profits. But even with that leeway, Smith’s attorney saw launching as a benefit corporation as a risky move. “He said we should incorporate as a C corporation like everybody else, then convert to a benefit corporation once we’d figured out how to make the business work,” Smith says. Smith did not take that advice. He founded Cotopaxi, an outdoor gear and apparel e-commerce brand, in 2013 as a benefit corporation, and began to raise venture capital funds from there—Cotopaxi is the first of the approximately 4,000 existing benefit corporations to take that route. “One of the biggest ideas behind Cotopaxi was the belief that I could have a bigger impact by building a business than I could if I just did humanitarian work on my own,” Smith says. “If there’s an investor that won’t invest in me because I founded a benefit corporation, and am giving some of my money away from the get-go, that’s not the right investor for us.” For Smith, his foray into the outdoor gear industry necessitated a social-impact approach. Growing up in Latin America, where his father, who spoke fluent Spanish, worked as an engineer, Smith became highly attuned to issues of global poverty and inequality from a young age. “My first memories as a four-year-old, having moved down there from the States, were seeing other children my age…