On being a nonprofit (and a girl) at TechCrunch 50

I swear I'll get back to book recommendations. In the meantime, I thought I'd share some thoughts and pics from our demo booth at TechCrunch 50 yesterday. Here's what our booth looked like (the woman on the left is Silvia Console Battilana, founder of Auctionomics and our Samasource Gala co-chair):

A lot of people came up and said "What are you doing here? What could a nonprofit get out of a technology conference?" For one thing, it's sort of silly to lump all nonprofits into one sector: we're a technology company that happens to be structured as a social business. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be at conferences with other technology companies, rather than with, say, nonprofit animal shelters.

Also, being a lone nonprofit in a sea of VC-backed startups makes people want to help you. In just two days, our head of sales got tons of new leads for our workers. One of our partners, CrowdFlower, even mentioned us on the main stage as a source of workers for his task-completion engine.

Oh, and on being a girl: there were only about 4 women in the demo pit (many of them founders), but people kept assuming that we were hired "booth babes." That was fun.